Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 20

The correct answer is D, 301. A 301 reply means Moved Permanently: the page now lives at a new address and the browser or search engine should use that address from now on. HTTP status codes come in classes. Codes in the 200s mean success, the 300s mean redirection, the 400s mean the client made a mistake and the 500s mean the server failed. Because 301 is permanent, browsers remember it and search engines pass the old page's standing to the new address, which is why a website uses 301 when a web address changes for good. Option A is wrong because 500 is Internal Server Error, a fault on the server side. Option B is wrong because 302 is Found, a temporary redirect, so clients keep asking the old address. Option C is wrong because 404 is Not Found, which means no page exists at that address at all. Exam tip: 301 permanent redirect, 302 temporary redirect, 404 not found, 500 server error.

The correct answer is B, Datasheet. In a database such as Microsoft Access, the view that shows a table as rows and columns, looking like a spreadsheet grid, is called Datasheet view. Each row of that grid is one record and each column is one field, and the names along the top come from the field names set in Design view. Datasheet view lets you type data straight in, sort it, filter it and widen columns, while Design view is where the data type, field size and primary key are fixed. Queries and forms can also be opened in Datasheet view, so the name belongs to the display format, not to one object. Option A is wrong because a record is a single row of the grid, one complete entry, not the grid itself. Option C is wrong because a query is a saved question that pulls out selected rows; it is a database object. Option D is wrong because 'Tables' names the objects being displayed, while the question asks what the grid-like view is called. Exam tip: Access tables have two main views — Datasheet for data, Design for structure.

The correct answer is B, working with databases. SQL stands for Structured Query Language, and it is used to create tables, insert rows, update and delete data and, above all, to ask questions of a relational database with statements such as SELECT; it is called non-procedural because the programmer states what result is wanted and the database system decides how to obtain it. Option A is wrong because web pages are laid out with HTML and styled with CSS, and made interactive with JavaScript. Option C is wrong because operating systems are written mainly in C, which gives direct control of memory and hardware; UNIX is the classic example. Option D is wrong because image editing is done by application software such as a photo editor, not by a query language. The fifth generation, which comes after SQL, contains PROLOG and LISP and is associated with artificial intelligence.

The correct answer is C, Graphics. In multimedia, graphics is the broad word for every kind of visual element a computer can store and show, so drawings, photographs, movies and simulations all sit inside it. The usual list of multimedia elements is text, graphics, audio, video and animation, and in that list graphics covers both pictures made by hand on the screen and pictures captured from the real world. Graphics are stored either as bitmaps, made of pixels, as in a JPEG or BMP photograph, or as vectors, made of lines and curves described by equations, as in a drawing or a CAD file. A is wrong because animation is only one kind of visual, a sequence of frames shown fast enough to look like movement. B is wrong because an image is a single still picture, so it is narrower than the four things listed. D is wrong because text is made of characters and carries no picture. Exam tip: multimedia elements are text, graphics, audio, video and animation; bitmap graphics use pixels, vector graphics use equations.

The correct answer is B, Ctrl + Home. Holding Ctrl while pressing Home carries the cursor right to the top of the document, no matter how many pages have been typed, and Ctrl + End does the same to the bottom. In MS Excel the same combination returns to cell A1. Option A is wrong because the Home key alone takes the cursor only to the beginning of the line it is sitting on. Option C is wrong because Shift + Home selects text from the cursor back to the start of that line, since Shift is the selection modifier. Option D is wrong because Alt + Home has no such role in MS Word, though in a web browser it opens the home page. The pattern worth remembering is that Ctrl widens a movement to the whole document and Shift turns a movement into a selection.

The correct answer is C, Netscape. Netscape Navigator, released in 1994 by Netscape Communications, the company founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, was the first web browser sold as a commercial product. It was the browser that carried the web to ordinary users in the mid nineties and at its peak held most of the market, before losing the browser war to Internet Explorer. A is wrong because Mosaic, built in 1993 at the NCSA of the University of Illinois, was the first widely used graphical browser but was academic software given away free, not a commercial product. B is wrong because Mozilla is the open source project born in 1998 from Netscape's released source code; its browser Firefox came in 2004 and is free. D is wrong because Internet Explorer arrived in 1995 and was bundled free with Windows rather than sold. Exam tip: Mosaic 1993 first popular graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1994 first commercial browser, Firefox 2004 from the Mozilla project.

The correct answer is B, the Information Technology Act, 2000. It is India’s first cyberlaw, and it is the statute that gave legal recognition to electronic records and to digital and electronic signatures, so that a contract concluded online is as enforceable as one written on paper and a department may accept a filing or issue a licence electronically. That recognition is exactly what electronic commerce needs, which is why the Act is described as providing its legal infrastructure; it also created the Controller of Certifying Authorities and was amended in 2008 to cover data protection, cyber terrorism and interception. Options A, C and D are wrong because no Information Technology Act was passed in 1996, 1998 or 1990; they are near years offered to test whether the candidate remembers the exact one. Note that 2000 is also the year in which the United Nations model law on electronic commerce was being adopted widely.

The correct answer is A, REL. An external stylesheet is attached to a page with a link tag written inside the head section, and the tag needs two things: href, which gives the address of the CSS file, and rel, which tells the browser what the linked file is for. Writing rel equals stylesheet is what marks the file as a set of style rules; leave rel out and the browser has no reason to treat the file as CSS, so the page appears unstyled. B is wrong because style is a separate way of writing CSS, either as a style block in the head or as an attribute on one element, and it has no part in linking an external file. C is wrong because body holds the visible content of the page while the link tag belongs in the head. D is wrong because html is the root element that wraps the whole document and has nothing to do with loading a stylesheet. Exam tip: link rel equals stylesheet with href, placed in the head.

The correct answer is B, John McCarthy. The American computer scientist John McCarthy used the phrase artificial intelligence in the proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, the meeting generally treated as the birth of the subject as a separate field, and he is therefore called the father of artificial intelligence; he also created the programming language LISP, long used for such work. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing came earlier and asked the deeper question whether machines can think, giving the Turing test in 1950, but he did not use the term artificial intelligence. Option C is wrong because Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer, not of artificial intelligence. Option D is wrong because Marvin Minsky, although a founder of the field and a participant at Dartmouth, did not coin the name. Keep the two fatherhoods apart: Babbage for the computer, McCarthy for artificial intelligence.

The correct answer is A, Ability to operate 24/7. An online store is a website or an app and not a shop with shutters, so it can take orders at any hour of any day, and that round-the-clock selling is one of the clear gains of e-commerce. The other gains follow from the same fact: a seller reaches buyers anywhere in the country without opening branches, keeps costs down because no showroom or large sales staff is needed, and can study a customer's past orders to suggest goods that suit them. Payment is made by card, net banking or UPI, and the order can be tracked until delivery. B is wrong because e-commerce widens reach instead of limiting it, carrying a small seller to a national market. C is wrong because online sellers personalise the experience closely, using browsing and purchase history to recommend products. D is wrong because operational costs usually fall, since rent, electricity and counter staff are saved. Exam tip: the gains of e-commerce are round-the-clock service, wider reach, lower costs and personalised offers.

The correct answer is B, a dot. The part of the name after the last dot is the extension, so in the name result.docx the extension is docx and the operating system uses it to decide which program will open the file and which icon will be shown. Option A is wrong because a hyphen is only an ordinary character in a name and separates nothing for the system. Option C is wrong because the slash separates folders in a path, such as the backslash used in Windows paths, and it cannot be used inside a file name at all. Option D is wrong because the underscore is used in place of a space in file names but carries no special meaning. Note also that renaming a file to a different extension does not change what is inside it.

The correct answer is D, Ministry of Education. The National Digital Library of India is a single window that brings together lakhs of learning resources, from school books to research papers, and lets a student search them free of cost in many Indian languages. It is developed by IIT Kharagpur under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, a mission of the Ministry of Education; the ministry was called the Ministry of Human Resource Development when the library was launched and was renamed in 2020. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Finance handles the budget, taxes and public spending, not education platforms. Option B is wrong because India has no ministry of that name; Science and Technology is a separate ministry of its own. Option C is wrong because the electronics and information technology ministry runs Digital India, e-governance services and BharatNet, but not this library. Exam tip: National Digital Library of India means IIT Kharagpur, the NMEICT mission and the Ministry of Education.

The correct answer is B, 1 July 2015. Digital India was launched on that day with the tagline Power to Empower, and it is implemented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology; the launch week was observed as Digital India Week. Option A is wrong because 15 August 2014 is when several announcements were made from the Red Fort, including the Jan Dhan Yojana, but not the launch of Digital India. Option C is wrong because 26 January 2016 is simply a Republic Day and carries no connection with the programme. Option D is wrong because 2 October 2014 is the date on which the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched, which is the commonest distractor in this question because the two programmes are often listed together as flagship missions. Fix the pairing as Digital India on 1 July 2015 and Swachh Bharat on 2 October 2014.

The correct answer is B, Platform as a Service. Cloud computing is sold in three service models, and PaaS is the middle one. A PaaS provider hands the developer a ready platform — the operating system, a runtime, a database, libraries and build tools — so an application can be written and deployed without buying or managing any hardware or patching an operating system. Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure App Service, Red Hat OpenShift and Heroku are examples. Below it, IaaS supplies raw computing power and storage, such as Amazon EC2, and the user still installs the software. Above it, SaaS delivers finished software over the browser, such as Gmail or Google Docs. The three main deployment models are public, private and hybrid cloud. Options A, C and D are wrong because Payment as a Service, Performance as a Service and Protocol as a Service are not cloud service models. Exam tip: IaaS gives the machine, PaaS the platform, SaaS the finished software.

The correct answer is B. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that instead of arguing about what thinking means, we should set a practical trial: a human questioner communicates in writing with an unseen machine and an unseen person, and if the questioner cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed. The test therefore judges behaviour from the outside and says nothing about how the machine works inside, which is exactly the point Turing was making. Option A is wrong because processor speed is measured in clock cycles and by benchmark programs, not by a conversation. Option C is wrong because storage is simply counted in bytes and their multiples. Option D is wrong because the strength of an encryption key is judged by its length in bits and by the effort needed to break the cipher, a matter of cryptography. Note the year and the paper together: Turing's question whether machines can think came in 1950, six years before the term artificial intelligence was coined.

The correct answer is A, Program counter. In the 8085A microprocessor the program counter is a 16-bit register that always holds the memory address of the next instruction, or op-code, to be fetched. After each fetch it is incremented automatically, and a jump or call instruction loads a new address into it so that control moves elsewhere in the program. Two other registers of the 8085 are often confused with it. The accumulator is the 8-bit register A in which arithmetic and logic results are stored. The stack pointer is a 16-bit register holding the address of the top of the stack, used while saving return addresses and register contents. B and C are wrong for those reasons. D is wrong because instruction pointer is the name Intel's later x86 processors use for the same idea; the 8085 register is called the program counter. Exam tip: 8085 has an 8-bit accumulator and 16-bit program counter and stack pointer.

The correct answer is A, Ctrl + Shift + Esc. This combination opens Task Manager at once, the window that lists running programs and background processes and allows a program that has stopped responding to be ended. The older route, Ctrl + Alt + Delete, now opens a security screen from which Task Manager has to be chosen, so the direct shortcut saves a step. Option B is wrong because Ctrl + Shift + T reopens the browser tab that was closed last. Option C is wrong because Alt + Shift + Esc is not a standard Windows shortcut. Option D is wrong because Ctrl + Alt + T opens a terminal window on Linux systems, not Task Manager on Windows. Keep Ctrl + Alt + Delete and Ctrl + Shift + Esc apart, since papers set them against each other.

The correct answer is B, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, shortened to MeitY, which is the nodal ministry for the programme and also for the National e-Governance Division, DigiLocker, UMANG and CERT-In. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Home Affairs handles internal security, the police and the census, and it is a user of digital systems rather than their owner. Option C is wrong because the Ministry of Communications looks after telecommunications and the Department of Posts, and although BharatNet touches it, the programme itself does not sit there. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Science and Technology funds research through its departments and has no role in delivering government services online. Remember that electronics and information technology were separated into their own ministry precisely to own such programmes.

The correct answer is C, Software as a Service. In this model the provider runs the finished application on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, managing nothing but the data and a few settings; a web mailbox, an online office suite and a hosted customer records system all work this way. Option A is wrong because Infrastructure as a Service supplies only the raw building blocks, virtual machines, storage and network, and the customer must install the operating system and every program above it. Option B is wrong because Platform as a Service supplies a ready environment with the operating system, the runtime and the database already in place, so that a developer need only upload the application code; it is aimed at developers, not at end users. Option D is wrong because network as a service is not one of the three standard models, which are infrastructure, platform and software. A simple memory rule is that the higher the model, the less the customer manages.

The correct answer is C, .exe. A file ending in .exe is an executable, which means it contains instructions the processor can run, so double clicking it starts a program. For the same reason an .exe file received from an unknown sender is the commonest carrier of a virus, and .com and .bat files behave in the same way. Option A is wrong because a .txt file holds plain text with no formatting and opens in a simple editor such as Notepad. Option B is wrong because .jpg is a compressed image format widely used for photographs. Option D is wrong because .csv holds comma separated values, a plain text table that spreadsheet programs read and write when data has to move between different software. Group the extensions by behaviour and this question answers itself.