Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 35

The correct answer is B, the line break tag. An empty or void tag has no closing tag because it encloses no content; it simply performs an action at the point where it is written, and the line break tag, written as br, moves the following text to a new line. The other standard empty tags are hr for a horizontal rule, img for an image and input for a form control. A is wrong because the paragraph tag is a container: it has an opening and a closing tag and the text of the paragraph sits between them. C is wrong because the table tag is a container that encloses rows and cells, and leaving it unclosed breaks the layout. D is wrong because the anchor tag is a container too; the words that become clickable are placed between its opening and closing tags, while the destination goes in the href attribute.

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 C, Linus Torvalds. Linus Torvalds, then a student in Finland, wrote the Linux kernel in 1991 and released it under the GNU General Public License, which is why Linux is the standard example of open source software in question papers. Option A is wrong but is the closest trap: Richard Stallman began the GNU Project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and the GNU tools are combined with the kernel in a full system, yet he did not write the kernel. Option B is wrong because Dennis Ritchie created the C language and, with Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system, which Linux resembles but does not descend from. Option D is wrong because Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, whose Windows is proprietary software, the opposite of the open source model.

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, the h1 tag. HTML offers six levels of heading, from h1 down to h6, and h1 is the largest and most important; it is normally used once on a page, for the page's own title, with h2 for the main sections and h3 for their subsections. B is wrong because h6 is the smallest of the six heading levels, the opposite of what is asked. C is wrong because head is not a heading at all: it is the section at the top of the document that holds information about the page, such as the title shown on the browser tab, the character encoding and the links to style sheets, and nothing in it appears in the page body. D is wrong because the big tag merely increased font size by one step and is obsolete in HTML5, where font size belongs to CSS, not to a tag.

The correct answer is B, Linux. Android uses a modified Linux kernel at its lowest layer to manage memory, processes, power and device drivers, and builds its own runtime, libraries, application framework and user interface above it. The project began at a company called Android Inc., which Google acquired in 2005, and the first Android handset reached buyers in 2008. Option A is wrong because the Windows NT kernel underlies desktop Windows and the discontinued Windows Mobile line, not Android. Option C is wrong because kernels derived from Unix and BSD underlie Apple macOS and iOS, which are Android competitors rather than its base. Option D is wrong because Symbian was a complete mobile operating system of the era before Android, used mainly by Nokia, and it was never a kernel for Android.

The correct answer is B, Richard Stallman. Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project in 1983 to build a complete operating system made only of free software, and in 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation to support it; he also wrote the GNU General Public License, which carries the copyleft condition that a modified version must be passed on with its source code. Option A is wrong because Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel in 1991, eight years later. Option C is wrong because Eric Raymond was among the founders of the Open Source Initiative in 1998, which recast the same idea in business terms and is often confused with the Free Software Foundation. Option D is wrong because Ken Thompson worked on Unix at Bell Labs with Dennis Ritchie, which is a different story altogether.

The correct answer is A. The Education and Research Network, ERNET, was begun in 1986 by the Department of Electronics with support from the United Nations Development Programme to link universities, the Indian Institutes of Technology and research laboratories, and it carried the first academic internet traffic in India. Option B is wrong because railway reservation was computerised separately from 1986 onwards through the Centre for Railway Information Systems. Option C is wrong because the linking of district offices with state capitals and the centre was the work of NICNET, the satellite network of the National Informatics Centre. Option D is wrong because chip making belongs to the Semiconductor Complex at Mohali, set up in the 1970s, and not to a network project at all. NICNET, the satellite network of the National Informatics Centre, is the usual distractor paired with ERNET.

The correct answer is B, href. It stands for hypertext reference and holds the URL of the destination, which may be another website, another page of the same site or a named position within the same page. The text or image placed between the opening and closing anchor tags is what the visitor clicks. A is wrong because src, short for source, gives the file to be loaded by an image, script, audio, video or inline frame element; it brings a resource into the page, whereas href points away from it. C is wrong because alt supplies alternative text for an image, shown when the picture cannot load and read aloud by screen readers, which also makes it important for accessibility and for search engines. D is wrong because link is an element placed in the head to attach an external style sheet, not an attribute of the anchor tag.

The correct answer is B, OR. Read the table row by row. The output is 0 only when both inputs are 0, and it is 1 in the other three rows, including the row where both inputs are 1. That is exactly the rule of an OR gate, which gives 1 when at least one input is 1 and behaves like two switches wired in parallel. A is wrong because a NOT gate has only one input and so cannot have a table with two input columns at all. C is wrong because an XOR gate responds only to a difference between its inputs, so its last row, with both inputs 1, would give 0 and not 1; this is the one row that separates OR from XOR and the reason the distractor is offered. D is wrong because an AND gate gives 1 only in the last row and 0 in the first three, which is the mirror image of the table shown.

The correct answer is D, the GNU General Public License. The Linux kernel has been distributed under the GPL since its early versions, which is why anyone who ships a modified kernel must also make the modified source code available; this copyleft condition is the licence's defining feature. Options A, B and C each name a real open source licence, but all three are permissive rather than copyleft: the MIT, BSD and Apache licences allow the code to be taken into a closed, proprietary product without the changes being published. That difference, copyleft against permissive, is the point a paper is testing when it lists these four names together. Remember that the GPL came from the Free Software Foundation, while the permissive licences are associated with universities and the Apache Software Foundation.

The correct answer is C, C2B. In the consumer-to-business model the consumer names the price or the terms and the business then accepts or declines the offer, so the usual direction of an offer is reversed. Reverse-auction travel sites, where a traveller bids a price for a hotel room, and freelancers who quote their own rate to companies are everyday examples. The model spread with the internet, which let one individual reach many firms at once. A is wrong because B2B commerce is trade between two businesses, such as a parts maker supplying a car factory. B is wrong because B2C commerce is a business selling directly to the end consumer, as a shopping website does. D is wrong because C2C commerce links one consumer with another through a platform, as online classified and resale sites do. Exam tip: read the pair in order - the first letter is who makes the offer, the second is who responds, so in C2B the consumer sets the price.

The correct answer is B, a comment opening with an angle bracket, an exclamation mark and two hyphens and closing with two hyphens and an angle bracket. The browser ignores everything between them, so comments are used to explain the code to other developers or to switch a block of markup off temporarily without deleting it. A is wrong because two forward slashes begin a single line comment in C, C plus plus, Java and JavaScript, not in HTML. C is wrong because a slash and an asterisk delimit a multi-line comment in those same languages and in CSS, so this is the syntax used inside a style sheet rather than in markup. D is wrong because HTML has no comment element; writing such a tag would simply leave an unknown element in the document, and the text inside it would still be displayed.

The correct answer is C, the Control Unit. It fetches each instruction from memory, decodes it, and then issues signals that tell the other parts of the system what to do and when. It manages the flow of data between memory, the arithmetic unit and the input and output devices, but it never performs arithmetic or a comparison itself.

Option A, the Arithmetic Logic Unit, is where all addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and logical comparisons actually happen, so it is precisely the unit the question excludes. Option B, cache memory, is a small very fast memory placed between the processor and main memory to hold frequently used data, and it is a memory rather than a control component. Option D, a register, is the smallest and fastest storage location inside the processor, used to hold an operand or an intermediate result for a moment. The CPU is the sum of the arithmetic unit, the control unit and the registers.

The correct answer is C, C-DAC. Bharat Operating System Solutions is built on Debian GNU/Linux by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, the research organisation under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that is also known for the PARAM series of supercomputers; BOSS comes in versions for schools, for desktops and for servers, with support for Indian languages. Option A is wrong because ISRO is the space agency and does not publish an operating system. Option B is wrong because the National Informatics Centre provides network and e-governance services to government departments rather than building a Linux distribution. Option D is wrong because the DRDO works on defence research and development. Pair C-DAC with both BOSS and PARAM, because papers ask for either.

The correct answer is B, pixel. The word is a contraction of picture element. A screen image is a grid of these points, and the number of them across and down the screen is what is quoted as the resolution of the monitor, so a higher pixel count means a finer picture.

Option A, the bit, is the smallest unit of data, a single binary digit, not a unit of a picture, and eight of them make a byte. Option C, the byte, is the unit in which memory and file sizes are measured. Option D, dot pitch, is a real term from the same chapter but it means something else: it is the distance between two neighbouring dots of the same colour on the screen, measured in millimetres, and a smaller dot pitch gives a sharper display. Examiners like to place pixel and dot pitch in the same set of options, so read the stem carefully.

The correct answer is B, Cascading Style Sheets. The word cascading describes the way conflicting rules are resolved: styles flow down from several sources, namely the browser's defaults, the author's style sheet and the user's own settings, and the cascade decides which rule wins, with specificity and order of appearance also counting. CSS controls colour, font, size, spacing, borders, background and layout, keeping appearance separate from the structure that HTML provides. A, C and D are wrong because no such expansion is used in any standard; they are written only to look plausible. Candidates should also remember the three ways of applying CSS, namely inline through the style attribute, internal through a style element in the head, and external through a separate file linked in the head, which is the preferred method.

The correct answer is D, compiler. A compiler reads the whole source program written in a high-level language, converts it into machine code in one pass of work and reports all the errors it finds together, after which the compiled program runs quickly without the translator being present. Option A is wrong because an interpreter translates and executes one statement at a time, stopping at the first error, which makes it slower to run but easier to debug. Option B is wrong because an assembler translates assembly language, a low-level language, into machine code, not a high-level language. Option C is wrong because a loader does no translation at all; it places an already translated program into main memory so that the processor can run it. All four are counted as system software.

The correct answer is B, the ol tag. An ordered list numbers its items automatically, and its type attribute, or the CSS list-style-type property, decides whether the markers are decimal numbers, lower or upper case letters, or lower or upper case Roman numerals. A is wrong because the ul tag creates an unordered list, whose items carry bullets such as a disc, a circle or a square and have no implied sequence. C is wrong because the li tag marks a single list item and must sit inside either an ordered or an unordered list; by itself it creates no list. D is wrong because the dl tag creates a definition or description list, in which each term, marked with dt, is paired with its description, marked with dd. The three list types and their tags are a standard matching question.

The correct answer is C, firmware. Firmware is program code written into a read-only or flash memory chip on a device, so it stays with the hardware even when the power is off; the BIOS or UEFI on a motherboard, which starts the machine and hands control to the operating system, is the example papers name, and the control programs inside a washing machine, a router or a camera are the same idea. Option A is wrong because middleware is software that sits between an application and a database or network to pass messages between them. Option B is wrong because freeware is a licence category, software given free of cost with closed source. Option D is wrong because shareware is also a licence category, free only for a trial. Firmware answers a how it is stored question, not a what it costs question.