Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 34

The correct answer is A, exemption of intermediaries from liability for third party information. Section 79 gives an intermediary such as a network service provider or a social media platform a safe harbour, provided it merely transmits or hosts the content, does not initiate or modify it, and observes the due diligence prescribed by the rules; the Shreya Singhal judgment read the section down so that an intermediary need act only on a court order or a government direction. Option B is wrong because identity theft is punished by section 66C. Option C is wrong because the power to intercept, monitor and decrypt is given by section 69. Option D is wrong because compensation for damage to a computer system is provided by section 43.

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 B, Very Large Scale Integration. VLSI is the technique of placing a very large number of transistors on a single silicon chip, and it made the microprocessor possible; the microprocessor in turn defines the fourth generation of computers, just as the integrated circuit defines the third, the transistor the second and the vacuum tube the first. Option A is wrong because the first word is Very, and nothing in the expansion reads Variable. Option C is wrong because Vertical and Layered form no part of the name even though chips are indeed built up in layers of silicon. Option D is wrong because VLSI is a fabrication technology and not a storage interface; interfaces of that kind are named by abbreviations such as USB, the Universal Serial Bus. The scale above it, used for present-day processors, is ULSI, Ultra Large Scale Integration.

The correct answer is C, 15. The International Mobile Equipment Identity is a fifteen-digit number assigned to every handset, made up of a code identifying the type approval of the model, a serial part and a final check digit. It can usually be displayed by dialling a short code and is printed under the battery or on the box. Because it identifies the device rather than the subscriber, it is the number quoted when a lost phone is reported so that the network can bar the handset. Option A, ten digits, is the length of an Indian mobile telephone number, which is why it is the commonest wrong answer. Option B, twelve digits, is the length of the Aadhaar number. Option D, twenty digits, matches the longer identifier printed on some SIM cards, not the IMEI.

The correct answer is B, list-style. It is a shorthand property, which means it sets several related properties in a single declaration: the type of the marker, its position and an image to use as the marker, in any order and with the omitted ones falling back to their default values. CSS has several such shorthand properties, among them font, background, margin, padding and border. A is wrong because list-style-type sets only the kind of marker, such as a disc, a circle, a square, decimal numbers or Roman numerals. C is wrong because list-style-position sets only whether the marker sits inside or outside the content box of the list item. D is wrong because list-style-image sets only a picture to be used in place of the standard marker. Each of those three is a single longhand property, and the shorthand list-style is the one that carries all three.

The correct answer is C, the Department of Atomic Energy. ECIL was set up at Hyderabad in 1967 under the Department of Atomic Energy to make electronic equipment for the atomic energy programme, and it produced the TDC series, the Trombay Digital Computers, for laboratory and industrial use. Option A is wrong because the Department of Electronics itself was created only in 1970, three years after ECIL, and it later sponsored C-DAC and ERNET. Option B is wrong because the Ministry of Railways was a large user of computers, installing IBM machines for reservation and accounting work, but it did not set up ECIL. Option D is wrong because the defence line of computing ran through the Defence Research and Development Organisation, whose ANURAG laboratory built the PACE processor. ECIL also made the TDC-316, a later and more capable machine of the same family.

The correct answer is C, system software. System software manages the machine itself and gives other programs a place to work: it includes the operating system, device drivers, the language translators and the utility programs. Option A is wrong because utility software is only one part of system software, the housekeeping part such as antivirus and disk defragmenter, and it does not by itself provide a platform. Option B is wrong because firmware is the software written permanently into a chip, such as the BIOS on a motherboard, so it is tied to one piece of hardware rather than being the general platform. Option D is wrong because application software is what the user opens to do work, such as a word processor or a browser, and it runs on top of system software rather than providing the platform.

The correct answer is B, 1. This is the complement law for addition, which corresponds to the OR operation. Whatever value A takes, one of A and its complement must be 1, and an OR gate gives 1 whenever any input is 1, so the expression is 1 in both cases. A is wrong because 0 is the answer to the companion law for multiplication, A multiplied by the complement of A, where one factor is always 0 and an AND gate therefore gives 0; the two complement laws are routinely interchanged in papers. C is wrong because A plus A, not A plus its complement, returns A, which is the idempotent law. D is wrong because nothing in Boolean algebra makes a sum collapse to the complement of one of its terms. Keep the pair together in memory: a variable OR its complement is 1, a variable AND its complement is 0.

The correct answer is C, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team. CERT-In works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and is the national nodal agency for collecting, analysing and issuing alerts on cyber security incidents such as intrusions, phishing campaigns and malware outbreaks; it was given statutory backing by Section 70B of the Information Technology Act. Option A is wrong because the body issues advisories and coordinates response rather than acting as an enforcement or regulatory authority. Option B is wrong because the words Central Electronic Research name no existing agency of this kind and the R in CERT stands for Response. Option D is wrong because encryption policy is a matter for the ministry, and CERT-In is not a trust. The expansion to remember in full is the ordinary one used worldwide, a Computer Emergency Response Team, with In added for India.

The correct answer is C, .docx. From Word 2007 onwards a document is saved by default in the Office Open XML format, whose extension is .docx. The format stores the document as compressed XML parts, which makes the file smaller and easier for a damaged file to be recovered from than the older binary format.

Option A, .doc, was the default extension up to Word 2003 and is still offered in the Save As list for users who must share a file with a very old version, but it is no longer the default. Option B, .txt, is a plain text file that keeps no formatting at all, no fonts, no tables and no pictures, so Word only produces it when the user asks for it. Option D, .dotx, is the extension of a Word template, the ready made pattern from which new documents are created, and not of an ordinary document.

The correct answer is C, the body element. An HTML document has two parts inside the html element, and the body is the one that holds everything the visitor actually sees: headings, paragraphs, images, tables, lists, links and forms. It is a container tag, with an opening and a closing tag, and it encloses the whole visible document. A is wrong because the head element holds information about the page rather than content shown on it, such as the character encoding, the description used by search engines and the links to style sheets and scripts. B is wrong because the title element sits inside the head and supplies the text that appears on the browser tab and in search results, not content in the page itself. D is wrong because meta is an empty tag placed in the head to carry metadata such as the encoding, the viewport setting and the page description.

The correct answer is C, 1,048,576. From Excel 2007 the grid of one worksheet was enlarged to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, so the very last cell of the sheet is XFD1048576. The figure is a power of two, two raised to the twentieth, which is why it looks so odd at first sight and is easy to recall once noticed.

Option A, 65,536, is the number of rows in Excel 2003 and earlier, and it is the answer only when the question names one of those old versions. Option B, 16,384, is the number of columns in Excel 2007 and later, not the number of rows, and swapping the two is the commonest mistake in this question. Option D, 2,097,152, is simply double the correct figure and has no place in Excel at all. Fix the pair in memory as rows just over ten lakh and columns just over sixteen thousand.

The correct answer is B, disk defragmenter. A defragmenter is a classic utility: it rearranges the scattered pieces of files on a disk so that the drive can read them in fewer movements, which is housekeeping work rather than work the user set out to do. Option A is wrong because MS PowerPoint is general purpose application software, a presentation package. Option C is wrong because Oracle is a database management system, again application software, even though it is used by programmers rather than ordinary users. Option D is wrong because Linux is an operating system, which is system software but not a utility; the operating system is the platform, while utilities are the small service programs that maintain it. Antivirus, disk cleanup, backup tools and file compression tools are the other standard utilities to remember.

The correct answer is B, FORTRAN. Its name is short for Formula Translation, it was developed by a team under John Backus at IBM and released in 1957, and it was the first language in which a programmer could write ordinary algebraic formulas instead of machine codes, which is why it is counted as the first high-level language; it is still used for heavy scientific and engineering computation. Option A is wrong because COBOL came two years later, in 1959, and was designed for business and commercial data processing, with Grace Hopper as the moving spirit behind it. Option C is wrong because BASIC was written in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz to teach beginners, long after FORTRAN. Option D is wrong because Pascal was designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970 to teach structured programming and is named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal. Keep the four years in order and this family of questions becomes easy.

The correct answer is D, controls. A form is the part of a page that collects information from the visitor, and the individual items placed in it to receive that information are called controls, or form controls: the text box, password box, radio button, check box, drop-down list, text area, submit button and reset button. Most are produced by the input tag with a different value of its type attribute, and each normally carries a name attribute so that the server can tell the values apart. A is wrong because object is a general programming term and also the name of a separate HTML element used to embed external resources. B is wrong because a table arranges data in rows and columns and has nothing to do with collecting input, although tables were once misused to lay forms out. C is wrong because a record is a database term, meaning one complete row of related fields.

The correct answer is A, Alan Turing. In 1936 the British mathematician Alan Turing described an abstract machine, now called the Turing machine, that defines what it means for a problem to be computable, and in 1950 he proposed the Turing test, by which a machine is judged intelligent if its answers cannot be told from a human being’s. He is called the father of computer science and of artificial intelligence, and his codebreaking work on Enigma shortened the Second World War. Option B is wrong because John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in 1956 and made LISP. Option C is wrong because Babbage is the father of the computer, the machine. Option D is wrong because Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975. Note that a Turing machine is an abstract model, a tape and a reading head, and not a physical computer.

The correct answer is D, freeware. Freeware costs the user nothing, but the licence allows only use: the source code stays with the owner, so the program cannot be studied, modified or redistributed in a changed form. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Skype and Google Chrome are the examples usually named. Option A is wrong because open source software is defined by exactly the opposite feature, a published source code that may be read, changed and passed on. Option B is wrong because shareware is free only for a trial period or in a cut-down version, after which payment is due. Option C is wrong because public domain software carries no copyright at all, so it may be used and altered without any licence. The trap in this question is to read free of cost as open source; the test is the source code.

The correct answer is A, HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext means text that carries links to other text, so that a reader can jump from one document to another instead of reading in a fixed order, and markup means the system of tags that labels each part of the content for the browser. B is wrong because no language called HighText Machine Language exists; machine language is the binary instruction set of a processor and is unrelated. C is wrong because transfer belongs to HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is the rule set used to carry pages across the network, not the language they are written in; candidates frequently confuse the two expansions, so keep them apart. D is wrong because the third word is Markup, not Making. The language was created by Tim Berners-Lee around 1991 and its standards are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The correct answer is C, shareware. Shareware follows the try before you buy model: the publisher lets anyone download and use the program for a trial period, or in a version with some features locked, and asks for payment or registration if the user wants to go on. WinZip and WinRAR are the examples most often quoted. Option A is wrong because freeware never asks for payment at all, however long it is used. Option B is wrong because public domain software has no copyright holder to charge a fee. Option D is wrong because open source software is identified by an open source code rather than by a payment model; most open source programs are free, and none of them locks features behind a trial clock in the way shareware does. Remember shareware by the word trial.

The correct answer is B, Tim Berners-Lee. Working at CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, he proposed a hypertext system in 1989 and by 1991 had written HTML, the first web browser and the first web server, and he went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which maintains the standards. A 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. C is wrong because Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. D is wrong because Vint Cerf, with Robert Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols and is called a father of the internet, which is a different achievement: the internet is the network of networks, while the web is one service running on it.