Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 32

The correct answer is A, Navigation with Indian Constellation. NavIC is the operational name of the system formally called the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System, built by ISRO so that the country would not depend on a foreign constellation for positioning in a crisis. It gives position, velocity and timing over India and a surrounding region rather than over the whole earth, which is why it is described as regional and not global. Option B, National Vehicle Information Centre, is invented and belongs to no space programme. Option C, Navigation Indian Communication, mixes the right words in the wrong order and omits the key idea of a constellation. Option D, National Integrated Coordination, has no connection with satellite navigation. The American system is GPS, the Russian one GLONASS, the European one Galileo and the Chinese one BeiDou.

The correct answer is B, duplexing. A telephone conversation requires both parties to speak and listen at the same time, so a mobile link must carry traffic in both directions together. That arrangement is called duplexing, and cellular systems achieve it either by using two separate frequency bands, known as frequency division duplex, or by alternating very rapidly between sending and receiving on one band, known as time division duplex. Option A, triplexing, is not a recognised mode of mobile communication. Option C is wrong because the correct term for one-way communication is simplex, not simplexing, and a simplex link such as a broadcast cannot support a phone call. Option D, quadraplexing, is not a term in mobile standards at all. Only duplex and its two forms appear in the syllabus of cellular communication.

The correct answer is C, 256. The number of colours a pixel can hold is two raised to the power of its bit depth, so eight bits give two to the eighth, that is 256 possible values. This is exactly the palette limit of the GIF format and of the older 256 colour display modes. Option A simply repeats the number of bits and is the commonest careless choice. Option B, 64, would be the count for six bits, not eight. Option D, 16,777,216, is the count for twenty-four bit true colour, in which eight bits each are given to red, green and blue, and it is the figure an examiner pairs with the phrase true colour. Candidates should memorise the small ladder: one bit two colours, four bits sixteen colours, eight bits 256 colours, sixteen bits 65,536 colours and twenty-four bits about 16.7 million colours.

The correct answer is B, 1988. C-DAC was established at Pune in 1988 under the Department of Electronics, with a mission to design and build an indigenous supercomputer after the United States declined to supply a Cray machine to India. Option A is wrong because 1976 is the year the National Informatics Centre was set up to build computing for government. Option C is wrong because 1991 is the year the first product of that mission, PARAM 8000, was completed, a common confusion in this question; 1991 is also the year of the Software Technology Parks of India scheme. Option D is wrong because 1998 belongs to other events in Indian science and has no bearing here. The pair to memorise is C-DAC in 1988 and PARAM 8000 in 1991, three years later.

The correct answer is B, 2000. The Information Technology Act was passed by Parliament in 2000, received assent on 9 June 2000 and came into force on 17 October 2000; it is therefore cited as the Information Technology Act, 2000. Option A is wrong because 1998 precedes the Act, though the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce on which it is modelled dates from 1996. Option C is wrong because 2005 is the year of the Right to Information Act, which is often confused with it in lists of early twenty-first century legislation. Option D is wrong because 2008 is the year of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, which substantially rewrote the parent Act and came into force on 27 October 2009; that amendment year is the commonest distractor in this question.

The correct answer is C, the NOT gate. It is the only gate that takes a single input, and it simply reverses the logic level it receives, giving 1 for an input of 0 and 0 for an input of 1; because the output is the inverse or complement of the input, the circuit is called an inverter. In Boolean notation it is written with a bar or a prime over the variable, and in a diagram it is a triangle with a small circle at its tip. A is wrong because an AND gate has two or more inputs and does not reverse anything. B is wrong for the same reason. D is wrong because a NAND gate inverts only the result of an AND operation and normally has two inputs, although it is worth remembering that a NAND gate with both of its inputs joined together does behave as an inverter, which is one of the proofs that NAND is a universal gate.

The correct answer is A, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC was built to compute artillery firing tables and is remembered as the first general-purpose electronic digital computer; it used thousands of vacuum tubes and belongs to the first generation of computers. Option B is wrong because no part of the name contains the word calculator, which belongs instead to EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. Option C is wrong because the letter C in ENIAC stands for Computer and not Compiler, and no early machine of this family carried the word network in its name. Option D is wrong because the first letter stands for Electronic and not Extended; the word Extended appears in EBCDIC, the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. Candidates should also keep EDVAC, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, and UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer, separate from ENIAC.

The correct answer is C, dot matrix printer. Its print head carries a column of tiny pins that strike an inked ribbon against the paper, forming each character out of dots. Because the strike passes through the paper, a dot matrix printer can print carbon copies in one go, and it is noisy for the same reason.

Option A, the laser printer, uses a laser beam, a photosensitive drum and dry toner fused by heat, and nothing ever strikes the page. Option B, the inkjet, sprays extremely fine droplets of liquid ink onto the paper without contact. Option D, the thermal printer, heats chemically treated paper so that the characters appear, which again involves no impact. All three are non-impact printers. The one-line rule for the exam is that only the dot matrix, the daisy wheel and the line printers strike the paper.

The correct answer is B, the National Payments Corporation of India. UPI was launched by NPCI in 2016 as a system that lets a user link several bank accounts to one mobile application and transfer money instantly using a virtual payment address or a QR code, without sharing account numbers. NPCI is the umbrella organisation for retail payments in the country and also runs RuPay, IMPS and the national automated clearing house. Option A is wrong because the Securities and Exchange Board of India regulates the securities market. Option C is wrong because the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India regulates telecom services and tariffs, not payment systems, even though UPI runs on phones. Option D is wrong because the Unique Identification Authority of India issues Aadhaar, which supports payments but does not operate UPI.

The correct answer is B, .xlsx. From Excel 2007 onwards the suite moved to the Office Open XML formats, and a plain workbook saves with the .xlsx extension. The x at the end stands for XML, the format in which the sheet contents are stored inside a compressed package, which is why these files are smaller and less prone to corruption than the older ones.

Option A, .xls, was the default extension of Excel 97 through Excel 2003; a 2016 workbook takes it only if the user deliberately saves in the Excel 97-2003 format. Option C, .xlsm, is the macro enabled workbook, used when the file has to carry VBA code, because a plain .xlsx refuses to store macros. Option D, .xltx, is an Excel template, a pattern file from which new workbooks are created rather than a workbook itself; the macro enabled template is .xltm. The exam expects .xlsx whenever the question names Excel 2007 or any later version.

The correct answer is C, Blender. Blender is a free and open-source suite in which an artist builds three dimensional models, applies materials and lighting, animates them along a timeline and then renders the frames into a finished image or film; it also carries sculpting, simulation and video editing tools. Option A, Audacity, is a free sound editor and recorder and handles no pictures at all. Option B, Inkscape, is free as well but works in two dimensions, drawing vector artwork in the SVG format. Option D, CorelDRAW, is proprietary paid software for two dimensional vector illustration and page layout, so it fails both halves of the question. For the exam, group the free tools together as GIMP for raster images, Inkscape for vector drawings, Audacity for sound and Blender for three dimensional animation.

The correct answer is C, 1971. Intel released the 4004 in 1971, putting a complete central processing unit on a single chip for the first time and beginning the fourth generation of computers along with the age of the personal computer. Option A is wrong because 1947 is the year the transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, which opened the second generation. Option B is wrong because 1958 is the year of the integrated circuit, invented independently by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, which opened the third generation. Option D is wrong because 1981 is the year IBM launched its personal computer, an important fourth generation product but a decade after the microprocessor itself. The 4004 was a four bit processor built on an order from a Japanese calculator company.

The correct answer is A, Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. In 2015 the Supreme Court struck down section 66A, which punished the sending of offensive messages, holding it vague and overbroad and therefore a violation of the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a). Option B is wrong because the Puttaswamy case of 2017 declared the right to privacy a fundamental right under Article 21; it is related in subject but is a different judgment. Option C is wrong because Kesavananda Bharati, decided in 1973, laid down the basic structure doctrine. Option D is wrong because the Vishaka judgment of 1997 laid down guidelines against sexual harassment at the workplace, later replaced by legislation in 2013. Note that the same judgment upheld section 69A on the blocking of content and read down section 79, so it did not sweep away the whole chapter of offences.

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 B, 4. A bit is a single binary digit, zero or one; four bits together form a nibble, and two nibbles, that is eight bits, form a byte. The nibble is a convenient unit because one hexadecimal digit is written in exactly four bits, which is why Binary Coded Decimal also stores each decimal digit in four bits. Option A is wrong because two bits have no standard name in this ladder. Option C is wrong because eight bits make a byte, the unit in which file sizes are measured, and this is the commonest trap in the question. Option D is wrong because sixteen bits are usually described as a word on a sixteen-bit machine, not as a nibble. The ladder above the byte is the one to memorise: 1,024 bytes make a kilobyte, 1,024 kilobytes a megabyte and 1,024 megabytes a gigabyte.

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, PNG. Portable Network Graphics applies the deflate algorithm, which rearranges and encodes the pixel data without discarding any of it, so the decompressed image is identical to the original, pixel for pixel; it also supports an alpha channel for partial transparency. Option A, JPEG, is deliberately lossy, dropping fine detail in blocks of the image to reach small file sizes, and repeated saving degrades the picture further. Option B, MP3, is lossy in the same spirit for sound, removing what the ear is unlikely to notice. Option D, MPEG video, is lossy both within a frame and between frames, since it stores only the changes from one frame to the next. Keep the two lists apart: lossy means JPEG, MP3 and MPEG, while lossless means PNG, GIF, TIFF without compression, FLAC and ZIP.

The correct answer is C, section 66F. Section 66F, inserted by the amendment of 2008, defines cyber terrorism and is the most severely punished offence in the Act, carrying imprisonment which may extend to life. Option A is wrong because section 65 deals with tampering with computer source documents and carries up to three years or a fine up to two lakh rupees. Option B is wrong because section 66E punishes violation of privacy by capturing or publishing an image of a private area of a person without consent. Option D is wrong because section 67B punishes publishing or transmitting material depicting children in a sexually explicit act, the most severely punished of the obscenity provisions but not cyber terrorism. The order of sections 66A to 66F is worth memorising.

The correct answer is A, American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII assigns a number to every letter, digit and punctuation mark so that text can be stored and sent as binary; in its original form it is a seven-bit code and therefore represents 128 characters. Option B is wrong because the second word is Standard, not Series, and the code is for interchange between systems rather than anything internal. Option C is wrong because the first word is American, naming the standards body that issued it, and not Automatic. Option D is wrong because Advanced and Serial form no part of the name, although serial transmission is one way ASCII text travels. The code to contrast it with is EBCDIC, the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, an eight-bit code used on mainframe computers, while Unicode extends coverage to the scripts of the world, Devanagari among them.

The correct answer is C, section 70B. Section 70B, inserted in 2008, appoints the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team as the national nodal agency for collecting, analysing and circulating information on cyber incidents and for issuing advisories; it works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and was set up in 2004. Option A is wrong because section 43A provides compensation where a body corporate fails to protect sensitive personal data. Option B is wrong because section 69A empowers the government to block public access to information, a power upheld in the Shreya Singhal judgment. Option D is wrong because section 79 gives intermediaries a safe harbour from liability for third party content provided they observe due diligence. The Controller of Certifying Authorities, which licenses the issuers of digital signature certificates, works under the same ministry but is created by section 17.