Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 36

The correct answer is C, src. Short for source, it holds the path or URL of the image file that the browser must fetch and display, and without it the image element has nothing to show. A is wrong because alt gives alternative text, displayed in place of the picture if it cannot be loaded and read out by screen readers for visually impaired users; it is strongly recommended on every image but it does not locate the file. B is wrong because href is the attribute of the anchor and link elements, giving the address a link points to, and it is not used by the image tag at all. D is wrong because title supplies advisory text that most browsers show as a tooltip when the pointer rests on the element; it is optional and decorative. Remember that img is also an empty tag.

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 C, eight. The RJ-45 connector is properly called 8P8C, meaning eight positions and eight contacts, and it is crimped on to the four twisted pairs of a network cable, one contact for each of the eight wires. It is the plug that fits the Ethernet port of a computer, a switch or a router. Option A is wrong because four contacts belong to the smaller RJ-11 telephone connector in its usual form. Option B is wrong because six positions also describe the RJ-11 housing, and the PS/2 mini-DIN socket has six pins, so six is the standard distractor here. Option D is wrong because fifteen is the number of pins on a VGA display connector, which has three rows of five and has nothing to do with networking.

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.

The correct answer is D, 5 GHz. Wi-Fi operates in the unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical bands, and the two classic bands are 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, with 6 GHz added in the latest equipment. Of the four choices only 5 GHz is an actual Wi-Fi band, so it is the answer. Option A, 2.4 MHz, looks tempting because 2.4 is the familiar number, but the unit is wrong by a factor of a thousand; 2.4 MHz lies in the medium and shortwave radio range used for broadcasting, not for wireless networking. Option B, 5 MHz, is likewise a shortwave frequency and is far too low to carry the bandwidth a wireless LAN needs. Option C, 10 GHz, lies in the microwave X band used in radar and satellite links; no Wi-Fi standard operates there. The lesson for the exam is to read the unit as carefully as the number.

The correct answer is B, Global System for Mobile Communications. GSM is the European-born digital standard that replaced the analogue first generation networks; it introduced the removable SIM card, digital encryption of the radio link, international roaming and the short message service, on which a plain text message is limited to one hundred and sixty characters. Option A, General Switching Mode, is not a telecommunications standard and simply borrows two technical-sounding words. Option C, Generic Signal Modulation, is invented, although modulation is indeed part of how GSM encodes a signal. Option D, Global Satellite Messaging, is wrong because GSM is a terrestrial cellular standard that works through ground base stations, not through satellites. Keep GSM with 2G, UMTS with 3G and LTE with 4G, and remember that CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, was the rival second generation family in which every call was spread across the band under its own code rather than given a separate time slot.

The correct answer is A, Universal Serial Bus. The standard first appeared in 1996 and was meant to replace the many different ports of an older computer with one socket for every kind of peripheral. It is called serial because it sends one bit at a time, universal because the same port serves a keyboard, a printer, a camera or a storage device, and a bus because many devices share the one path, up to a hundred and twenty-seven of them through hubs. Option B is wrong because the middle word is serial, not system, and a system bus is the internal path between the processor and memory, a different idea altogether. Option C is wrong because the first word is universal, not unified. Option D is wrong because USB is not limited to storage, even though pen drives are its commonest use.

The correct answer is B, IIT (BHU), Varanasi. PARAM Shivay, commissioned in 2019 at the Indian Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, was the first supercomputer installed under the National Supercomputing Mission, which was approved in 2015. Option A is wrong because IIT Kharagpur received PARAM Shakti, which followed Shivay. Option C is wrong because IISER Pune received PARAM Brahma. Option D is wrong because IIT Kanpur received PARAM Sanganak. Other systems of the mission include PARAM Yukti at JNCASR Bengaluru, PARAM Ganga at IIT Roorkee, PARAM Ananta at IIT Gandhinagar, PARAM Himalaya at IIT Mandi and PARAM Porul at NIT Tiruchirappalli, so the question is usually set on the first one or on a specific institution's machine. The mission also aims to raise the share of components designed and assembled within India at each stage.

The correct answer is C, IEEE 802.15.1. The 802.15 group of standards covers wireless personal area networks, and 802.15.1 is the one that was drawn from the Bluetooth specification; the technology itself is now developed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. Option A, IEEE 802.3, is Ethernet, the wired local area network standard that uses twisted pair or fibre cable, so it is not wireless at all. Option B, IEEE 802.11, is Wi-Fi, a wireless local area network reaching tens of metres through an access point, a different scale of network from Bluetooth's personal area. Option D, IEEE 802.16, is WiMAX, intended for wireless broadband across a metropolitan area. A quick way to remember the set is 802.3 wired LAN, 802.11 Wi-Fi, 802.15.1 Bluetooth, 802.15.4 Zigbee and 802.16 WiMAX.

The correct answer is C, firmware. Firmware is software written permanently into a read only memory chip at the time of manufacture. The BIOS on the motherboard is the standard example: it is the first code the processor executes when the machine is switched on, it runs the power on self test and it then calls the bootstrap loader, so nothing else can run before it.

Option A, application software, is written for a user task such as typing a document or preparing a spreadsheet, and it runs only after the operating system is already loaded. Option B, utility software, includes tools such as antivirus programs, disk defragmenters and file compressors; these are system software but they are stored on disk, not burnt into a chip. Option D, freeware, describes the price of a program rather than where it lives; freeware is software distributed free of cost and may be of any kind.

The correct answer is B, fifteen. The Video Graphics Array connector is a D-shaped plug with fifteen pins in three rows of five, usually coloured blue, and it carries an analogue video signal only, so a separate cable is needed for sound. Option A is wrong because nine pins belong to the DB-9 serial connector of the RS-232 standard, known to the operating system as the COM port. Option C is wrong because nineteen pins belong to the standard Type-A HDMI connector, which carries digital video and audio together; mixing up the fifteen of VGA with the nineteen of HDMI is the usual mistake in this question. Option D is wrong because twenty-five pins belong to the DB-25 parallel or LPT connector, which was used for printers on older computers.

The correct answer is D, Mailings. The Mailings tab holds Start Mail Merge, Select Recipients, Insert Merge Field, Preview Results and Finish and Merge, along with the Envelopes and Labels commands. A mail merge joins a main document, which carries the matter common to everyone, with a data source, which carries the list of names and addresses, and prints one personalised copy for each record.

Option A, the Insert tab, is used for pages, tables, pictures, links, headers, footers and symbols. Option B, the References tab, is used for a table of contents, footnotes, endnotes, captions, citations and an index. Option C, the Review tab, is used for the spelling and grammar check, the thesaurus, word count, comments and track changes. None of these three contains the merge commands.

The correct answer is B, seven. In a piconet one device acts as the master and sets the clock and the hopping sequence, and up to seven other devices can be active slaves at the same time, which makes eight devices in the piconet in all. Addressing in classic Bluetooth uses a three bit active member address, and three bits give eight values, one of which is reserved for the master; that is the arithmetic behind the number. Further devices can be held in a parked state and brought in when a slot falls free. Option A, three, is simply too small. Option C, eight, is the favourite trap: eight is the total size of the piconet including the master, not the number of slaves. Option D, sixteen, exceeds what the three bit address allows. When two piconets are bridged by a shared device the combination is called a scatternet.

The correct answer is B, the equals sign. Excel treats whatever follows an equals sign as something to be calculated, so =A1+B1 adds the two cells and =SUM(A1:A10) totals a range. Without that sign the same text is stored as plain text and no calculation happens, which is why a formula that shows itself in the cell instead of a result has usually lost its equals sign.

Option A, the hash sign, begins an error value such as #DIV/0! or #NAME? and is written by Excel, never by the user. Option C, the asterisk, is the multiplication operator used inside a formula, as in =A1*B1, and a formula may also be started with a plus or a minus sign in Excel for the convenience of old Lotus users, but never with an asterisk. Option D, the colon, is the range operator that joins the first and last cells of a block, as in A1:A10. Each of these three has a real job in Excel, just not the job of starting a formula.

The correct answer is C, HDMI. The High-Definition Multimedia Interface carries high-definition digital video and multi-channel digital audio in the same cable, which is why one HDMI lead is enough to join a computer to a television or a projector. Option A is wrong because the Video Graphics Array port carries an analogue video signal only and needs a separate audio cable, a difference that is asked again and again. Option B is wrong because the PS/2 port is a six-pin socket for a keyboard or a mouse and carries no video or audio at all. Option D is wrong because the serial port sends one bit at a time at low speed and was used for modems and instruments, not for display. DisplayPort is the other port that carries both video and audio, chiefly on computer monitors.

The correct answer is D, F5. Pressing F5 anywhere in a presentation closes the editing window and runs the slide show from slide one, whichever slide you were working on. To begin instead from the slide on the screen, the key is Shift + F5, and the pair F5 and Shift + F5 should always be learnt together.

Option A, Alt + F5, does not start an ordinary show from the beginning; in recent versions it opens Presenter View, where the speaker sees notes and a timer. Option B, Ctrl + P, is the print command in editing view, and inside a running show it turns the mouse pointer into a pen for writing on the slide, so it never starts the show. Option C, Alt + Tab, belongs to Windows rather than PowerPoint and merely switches between the open programs on the taskbar.

The correct answer is A, 13.56 MHz. NFC is built on the high frequency band of radio frequency identification and uses magnetic induction between two loop antennas at 13.56 MHz, which is why the devices must be brought within about four centimetres of each other. Option B, 125 kHz, is the low frequency RFID band used for animal tags and older access cards, which have a wider read distance but much slower data transfer. Option C, 2.4 GHz, is the band shared by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microwave ovens; its reach is metres, far too long for a technology whose security rests on being readable only at a touch. Option D, 865 MHz, is the ultra high frequency RFID band allotted in India for logistics and for FASTag on the windscreen. Remembering 13.56 MHz as the number common to NFC and high frequency RFID cards settles several questions at once.

The correct answer is A, because that statement is the false one. Unshielded twisted pair cable has no metal foil or braid around its pairs, so it resists electromagnetic interference less well than shielded twisted pair, not better; the only protection it has is the twisting of each pair, which cancels much of the noise picked up by the two wires. Option B is a true statement, since UTP is the cable of almost every office and home local area network, in grades such as Cat 5e and Cat 6. Option C is also true: without the shield the cable is thinner, lighter and easier to bend around corners, which is one reason installers prefer it. Option D is true as well, because UTP is cheap to buy and to terminate and performs well over the hundred-metre segment that Ethernet allows.

The correct answer is B, the radio signal of the reader. A passive tag is only a chip and an antenna. When it enters the field of a reader, the incoming radio waves induce a current in the antenna, that current powers the chip for an instant, and the chip replies by modulating the reflected signal, a method called backscatter. Because there is no battery the tag costs very little, can be printed as a sticker, and lasts for years, but its read range is short and it cannot start a conversation of its own. Option A describes an active tag, which carries a battery and transmits on its own over tens of metres, and is used on shipping containers and vehicles. Option C is wrong because a solar cell would need light, which is useless for a tag inside a carton or on a library book. Option D is wrong because the earth's magnetic field is far too weak and steady to power or carry data.

The correct answer is B, the keyboard. A computer with PS/2 ports has two six-pin mini-DIN sockets that are identical in shape, so they are distinguished by colour: purple for the keyboard and green for the mouse. Plugging the devices into the wrong sockets leaves them unrecognised, which is why the colour code was introduced at all. Option A is wrong because the mouse socket is the green one, and this swap is exactly what the question tests. Option C is wrong because a printer was connected through the twenty-five-pin parallel or LPT port, and is connected through USB today; it never used a PS/2 socket. Option D is wrong because a microphone goes into the pink 3.5 millimetre audio jack, while green among the audio jacks means the speaker or line output, a second colour code worth learning separately.