Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 21

The correct answer is C, nine. The nine pillars are Broadband Highways, Universal Access to Mobile Connectivity, the Public Internet Access Programme, e-Governance or reforming government through technology, e-Kranti for the electronic delivery of services, Information for All, Electronics Manufacturing, IT for Jobs, and Early Harvest Programmes. Option A is wrong because five is the number of vision areas in some summaries and of pillars in none; the programme states three vision areas. Option B is wrong because seven is simply a near number offered to catch a candidate who half remembers the list. Option D is wrong because eleven has no place in the design of the programme. The safest way to hold this is to remember three vision areas and nine pillars, because papers ask for both numbers and swap them between options.

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 D, hypervisor cloud, because no such deployment model exists. A hypervisor is a piece of software, also called a virtual machine monitor, that divides one physical server into several virtual machines; it is the tool that makes cloud computing possible, not a way of deploying a cloud. Option A is wrong as an answer because the public cloud, open to any customer who pays for it, is a genuine deployment model and the commonest one. Option B is wrong because a private cloud, built and reserved for a single organisation so that it keeps full control of its data, is equally standard. Option C is wrong because a hybrid cloud, which joins a private cloud to a public one so that sensitive workloads stay inside while sudden peaks of demand spill outside, is the third. The fourth, which the question does not list, is the community cloud, shared by several organisations with a common concern. Do not confuse the four deployment models with the three service models.

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 C, the Unique Identification Authority of India, usually called UIDAI. It was set up in 2009 and was given statutory standing by the Aadhaar Act of 2016, and the first Aadhaar number was issued in 2010 at Tembhli village in the Nandurbar district of Maharashtra. Option A is wrong because the Reserve Bank of India is the central bank and regulates banks and payment systems; it does not issue identity numbers. Option B is wrong because the National Informatics Centre, set up in 1976, provides the technical backbone of government computing, such as networks, data centres and websites, but it is not the issuing authority. Option D is wrong because the Election Commission issues the elector photo identity card, which is a different document with a different purpose, and mixing the two is the standard trap here.

The correct answer is B, Meta Search Engine. A meta search engine keeps no index of its own. It hands the user's query to several other search engines at the same time, collects what they send back, removes repeated hits and shows one merged list. Because it borrows from many sources, a single search covers more of the web than any one engine would on its own. Dogpile and Startpage work in this way. A is wrong because advanced search only means the extra filters an ordinary engine offers, such as date, file type or exact phrase, while it still searches its own index. C is wrong because search tool is a loose term for any utility that finds files or text, not a defined class of engine. D is wrong because Boolean searching refers to using AND, OR and NOT inside one engine, not to querying other engines. Exam tip: meta means about, so a meta search engine searches the searchers.

The correct answer is B, Kevin Ashton. The British technologist Kevin Ashton used the phrase Internet of Things in 1999 while working on radio frequency identification tags for tracking goods through a supply chain; his point was that if every object could report its own position and state, the internet would no longer depend on people typing data into it. Option A is wrong because Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, along with the first browser, the first server and the HTTP protocol, which is a different thing from the Internet of Things. Option C is wrong because Vint Cerf, with Robert Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols and is called a father of the internet itself. Option D is wrong because Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email and chose the at sign to separate the user from the host. A useful line to remember is that the web is for documents, the internet is for computers and the Internet of Things is for objects.

The correct answer is A, HREF. The href attribute of the anchor tag carries the address the browser should open when the link is clicked, so href alone decides where a link leads. The text written between the opening and closing anchor tags is what the reader sees and clicks. The value of href can be a full web address, a path to another file on the same site, or a point inside the same page written after a hash. B is wrong because src supplies the source file for images, scripts and iframes, not for links. C is wrong because link is a separate element placed in the head section to attach stylesheets; it is not an attribute of the anchor tag. D is wrong because HYPERLINK is not an HTML attribute at all, it is the name of a spreadsheet function. Exam tip: remember the pair — href points a link somewhere, src pulls a file in.

The correct answer is C, the National Payments Corporation of India, the umbrella organisation for retail payments in the country, which built the Unified Payments Interface and launched it in 2016. The same corporation runs the RuPay card network, the BHIM application and the immediate payment service, so a question about any of these has the same answer. Option A is wrong because the Reserve Bank of India is the regulator that permitted and oversees the interface, and the distinction between regulating a system and operating it is exactly what the question tests. Option B is wrong because the State Bank of India is only one of the many banks whose customers use the interface. Option D is wrong because the Securities and Exchange Board of India regulates the securities market and has nothing to do with retail payments.

The correct answer is D, the operating system will return an error indicating that the directory is not empty. The plain remove-directory command is built to delete an empty folder only. In Windows it is rmdir, also written rd, and in Linux it is rmdir; both stop with a message such as "The directory is not empty" when anything is still inside. To remove a folder along with everything in it you have to ask for it: rmdir /s in Windows or rm -r in Linux, which walks through the tree, deletes the contents and then the folder. This guard exists so that a single short command cannot wipe out a large tree by mistake. Option A is wrong because nothing inside is touched without the recursive switch. Option B is wrong because a file system cannot leave files with no parent folder; the entries go together or not at all. Option C is wrong because the plain command does not ask item by item, which is what an interactive option like rm -i does. Exam tip: rmdir empties only, rm -r for the whole tree.

The correct answer is A, Radio Frequency Identification. An RFID system has a tag carrying a tiny chip and an antenna, and a reader that sends out radio waves; the tag answers with its stored identity, so an object can be recognised without being seen or touched and without a line of sight, unlike a barcode that must be shown to a scanner. Passive tags carry no battery and draw their power from the reader's signal, which is why they can be made as thin as a label. RFID is used in toll collection, library books, baggage handling, warehouse stock and animal identification, and it was work on exactly such tags that led Kevin Ashton to the phrase Internet of Things. Option B, option C and option D are all invented expansions that do not correspond to any real technology; they are offered only because they use the same letters. Note the related short range technology NFC, near field communication, which is the basis of tap to pay cards.

The correct answer is D, Transmission speed. The 56 K rating of a modem means it can transfer data at up to 56 kilobits per second, so the figure describes speed, not size. A modem, short for modulator-demodulator, converts the computer's digital signals into analogue form for a telephone line and converts incoming analogue signals back into digital form. Data transfer speed is measured in bits per second and its multiples, kbps, Mbps and Gbps, and the 56 kbps dial-up modem was the fastest standard for ordinary telephone lines before broadband. A is wrong because the physical size of a modem is not rated in kilobits. B is wrong because memory size is measured in bytes such as MB or GB, not in K of this kind. C is wrong because capacity here is loosely worded; the rating fixes the rate of transfer per second. Exam tip: modem speed is in bits per second; storage is in bytes.

The correct answer is B, Government to Citizen. This is the model in which a service is delivered directly to an individual, such as an online caste or income certificate, a driving licence application or a pension payment, and it is the model most visible to the public. The other three models are G2B, government to business, which covers procurement through the Government e-Marketplace and the filing of returns; G2G, government to government, where departments exchange data with one another; and G2E, government to employee, which covers pay, leave and pension systems for staff. Options A, C and D are wrong because company, commerce and corporation are all covered by the single category G2B, and none of them is a separate recognised model. Learn the four abbreviations together, since papers ask for any one of them.

The correct answer is C, Joint Photographic Experts Group. The format is named after the committee of experts that drew up the standard, which was published in 1992 for compressing photographs. A JPEG file uses lossy compression: it throws away the fine detail the human eye is least likely to miss, so a picture that would need several megabytes as raw data is stored in a few hundred kilobytes. That is why photographs on websites and in phone galleries are saved as .jpg or .jpeg, while logos, line drawings and screenshots are better kept as PNG or GIF, which are lossless. A is wrong because it puts Photography and Exports in place of Photographic and Experts. B is wrong because it replaces Photographic with Pixel. D is wrong on both counts, using Pixel as well as Exports. Exam tip: JPEG is the Joint Photographic Experts Group and is lossy; PNG and GIF are lossless; MPEG is the Moving Picture Experts Group.

The correct answer is A. Entries on a blockchain are grouped into blocks, and every block carries the cryptographic hash, a short fixed length fingerprint, of the block immediately before it. Changing even one character inside an old block changes that block's hash, which no longer matches the value recorded in the next block, and so the mismatch cascades through every later block; since identical copies of the chain are held by many computers on the network, the tampered copy is rejected at once. This is why a blockchain is called tamper evident and append only. Option B is wrong because it states the opposite of the design: a blockchain is deliberately distributed across many nodes and has no single server to attack. Option C is wrong because a password controls who may write, not whether a written record can be silently changed. Option D is wrong because fingerprints are a means of authenticating a person and are not used to seal blocks. The idea was published in the 2008 Bitcoin paper under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

The correct answer is C, B2C. Flipkart, Alibaba and Amazon run online marketplaces whose storefronts sell goods to individual shoppers, and a business selling to a consumer is business-to-consumer, or B2C. In this model a firm lists its products on a website or an app, the customer orders and pays online, and the goods reach the home, so the shop, the salesman and the cash counter are all replaced by software. B2C is the commonest face of e-commerce and the one ordinary buyers meet every day. A is wrong because consumer-to-business, C2B, is the reverse case, where an individual offers a service or product to a firm, as a freelance designer or a blogger selling advertising space does. B is wrong because consumer-to-consumer, C2C, means one individual selling to another through a platform such as OLX. D is wrong because business-to-business, B2B, covers a firm selling to another firm, as IndiaMART does. Exam tip: Amazon and Flipkart are B2C, OLX is C2C and IndiaMART is B2B.

The correct answer is A, Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance. The application was built by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with the National e-Governance Division so that a citizen can reach hundreds of central and state services, from provident fund enquiries to gas bookings, from a single app in several languages. Options B, C and D are wrong because each changes one or more words of the expansion, and this is precisely how full-form questions are set: the examiner keeps the first letters and alters the words behind them. The words to fix in memory are unified, mobile, application, new-age and governance. Keep it apart from DigiLocker, which stores documents in the cloud, and from MyGov, which is the citizen engagement platform for consultations.

The correct answer is C, a qubit. A classical computer stores information in bits, each of which must be either zero or one at a given moment. A quantum computer uses a quantum bit, shortened to qubit, which can be in a superposition of zero and one at the same time, and qubits can also be entangled so that the state of one is tied to the state of another. These two properties allow a quantum machine to explore many possibilities together, which is why certain problems in factorisation, search and molecular simulation could be solved far faster than on any classical machine. Option A is wrong because the bit is the unit of classical computing, the very thing the qubit replaces. Option B is wrong because a byte is simply a group of eight bits, the usual unit for measuring storage. Option D is wrong because a nibble is a group of four bits, that is half a byte. Remember the trio of terms that come with the qubit: superposition, entanglement and decoherence, the last being the loss of the quantum state through disturbance.

The correct answer is B, all gram panchayats. BharatNet lays optical fibre to the panchayat level so that village institutions, Common Services Centres, schools and health centres can get broadband, and it is the main project under the Broadband Highways pillar of Digital India. Option A is wrong because district headquarters were already connected long before this project; the whole difficulty of BharatNet lies in the last stretch from the block to the village. Option C is wrong because State capitals have been on the national network since the earliest days of government computing. Option D is wrong because railway station connectivity was a separate effort, carried out with a telecom operator and the railways, and is not what this project set out to do. Remember BharatNet with the gram panchayat.

The correct answer is A. The three terms sit one inside the other like circles. Artificial intelligence is the whole field of making machines behave intelligently, and it includes approaches that use no learning at all, such as rule based expert systems and search algorithms. Machine learning is the part of it in which the program is shown examples and works out the pattern itself instead of being given the rules. Deep learning is a part of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks with many hidden layers, and it is what made image recognition, speech recognition and machine translation work well. Option B is wrong because it inverts the outermost relation; artificial intelligence is the widest of the three, not the narrowest. Option C is wrong because it inverts the inner relation: deep learning is inside machine learning, not the other way round. Option D is wrong because the three are nested and not identical, and examiners test exactly this nesting. The three families of machine learning are supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning.