Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 37

The correct answer is B, the LPT port. LPT stands for line print terminal, the name by which the operating system knew the parallel port, which used a twenty-five-pin DB-25 connector on the computer and a thirty-six-pin Centronics connector at the printer end. Being parallel, it sent eight bits at once over separate wires, which made it faster than a serial port over a short distance. Option A is wrong because COM, short for communication, was the name of the serial port, which used the nine-pin DB-9 connector and sent one bit at a time. Option C is wrong because the PS/2 port is the six-pin socket for keyboard and mouse. Option D is wrong because the Accelerated Graphics Port was an internal expansion slot for a graphics card on the motherboard, not an external port at all.

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, passive ultra high frequency RFID. A FASTag is a battery free RFID sticker pasted on the inside of the windscreen. An overhead reader at the toll plaza energises it, reads the identity number, matches it with the linked prepaid wallet or bank account and debits the toll while the vehicle keeps moving. The ultra high frequency band is chosen precisely because it can be read from several metres at speed. Option A, Bluetooth Low Energy, needs pairing and is meant for personal devices, not for a stranger's reader at a plaza. Option C, an infrared link, requires a clear line of sight and fails in rain, dust and sunlight, so it is unsuited to a highway. Option D is wrong because satellite positioning tells where a vehicle is but cannot by itself identify and charge it at a gantry, though satellite based tolling is being tested as the next step.

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 B, 480 megabits per second, the speed known as high speed in the USB 2.0 specification. Option A is wrong because twelve megabits per second was the full-speed rate of USB 1.1, forty times slower, with a low-speed mode of one and a half megabits per second for devices such as a mouse. Option C is wrong because five gigabits per second is the SuperSpeed rate of USB 3.0, whose connector is usually coloured blue so that it can be told apart from a 2.0 socket. Option D is wrong because ten gigabits per second belongs to the generation after USB 3.0. The figures to carry into the examination hall are therefore twelve for 1.1, four hundred and eighty for 2.0 and five thousand, that is five gigabits, for 3.0.

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, a Danish king who united warring tribes. The technology is named after Harald Gormsson, the tenth century king of Denmark nicknamed Bluetooth, who brought the Danish tribes under one rule. The engineers at Ericsson who were building a radio link to replace cables chose the name because their aim was the same, to unite devices that could not talk to one another, and the familiar logo is a binding of the runes for the king's initials. Option B is wrong because no inventor of that name exists; the engineer usually credited with the radio design is Jaap Haartsen. Option C is a folk explanation with no basis, since the antenna has no such shape or colour. Option D is wrong because the work was done at Ericsson in Lund in Sweden, but the name honours the Danish king and is not a place name at all.

The correct answer is B, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce. The model law was adopted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in 1996 and recommended to member states by the General Assembly, and India's Act follows its scheme for giving legal recognition to electronic records and signatures. Option A is wrong because the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime of 2001 is a Council of Europe treaty to which India is not a party. Option C is wrong because the General Data Protection Regulation is a European Union law of 2016 that came much later and concerns data protection, not electronic commerce. Option D is wrong because the Berne Convention of 1886 deals with copyright in literary and artistic works. The model law was adopted to let member states give electronic records the same standing as paper, and India's sections 4, 5 and 10A follow it almost directly.

The correct answer is D, optical fibre cable. Fibre carries data as pulses of light travelling through a glass or plastic core by total internal reflection, and since no electric current flows in it, an external electromagnetic field cannot induce noise in the signal. That is also why fibre offers the highest bandwidth, loses least signal over distance and is very hard to tap without being detected. Option A is wrong because unshielded twisted pair relies only on the twisting of its pairs to cancel noise and is the most vulnerable of the four. Option B is wrong because the foil or braid of shielded twisted pair reduces interference but does not remove it. Option C is wrong because the braided shield of coaxial cable likewise reduces interference without making the cable immune, as the signal is still electrical.

The correct answer is A, a few centimetres. NFC is deliberately designed for extremely short range, so the two devices must be touching or nearly touching before any data passes. This limitation is itself the security feature that makes the technology suitable for contactless card payments, tap-to-pay on phones, transit tickets and identity tags, since an attacker cannot read the exchange from across a room. Option B, about ten metres, is the usual working range of Bluetooth, which is the commonest confusion in this question. Option C, about one hundred metres, is closer to the range of a Wi-Fi access point in open conditions. Option D, several kilometres, describes a cellular link to a base station or a long-range radio system, far beyond anything NFC attempts.

The correct answer is D, WPA3. WPA3 is the newest of the four and the strongest; it replaces the old pre shared key handshake with simultaneous authentication of equals, which resists offline guessing of the password, and it encrypts traffic even on an open network. Option A, WEP, or wired equivalent privacy, is the oldest and is completely broken; its short initialisation vector lets an attacker recover the key from captured traffic in minutes, and it should never be used. Option B, WPA, was a stopgap that added the TKIP key mixing scheme to old hardware and has since been found weak. Option C, WPA2, brought in AES based encryption and is still widely used and reasonably safe, but it is vulnerable to the key reinstallation style of attack and to offline password guessing, which is exactly what WPA3 was designed to stop. The order of strength is WEP, then WPA, then WPA2, then WPA3.

The correct answer is C, C-DAC and IISc Bengaluru. The National Supercomputing Mission, approved in 2015, is steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology, and it is implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing at Pune together with the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru. Option A is wrong because ISRO and DRDO build computers for their own space and defence needs, such as SAGA-220 and PACE. Option B is wrong because BARC's ANUPAM series serves atomic energy and the National Informatics Centre runs government networks. Option D is wrong because NIC and ERNET India are network and e-governance bodies, not builders of supercomputers. The mission's aims are to install systems, to make the hardware in India and to train users.

The correct answer is B, a telephone or dial-up modem line. The RJ-11 is the small modular connector at the end of a telephone cord, with four or six positions and usually two or four contacts, and it was also used to join a dial-up or ADSL modem to the telephone line. Option A is wrong because Ethernet uses the wider RJ-45 connector with eight contacts; an RJ-11 plug will not hold in an RJ-45 port, and confusing the two is the commonest mistake in this part of the syllabus. Option C is wrong because a monitor is connected through VGA, DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort. Option D is wrong because a hard disk inside the cabinet is connected by a SATA data cable of seven pins, or by the older forty-pin IDE ribbon cable, neither of which uses a modular telephone connector.

The correct answer is C, Dennis Ritchie. He created C at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s and used it to rewrite the UNIX operating system, which is why C is called the mother of system programming languages and still underlies most operating systems. Option A is wrong because James Gosling developed Java at Sun Microsystems and released it in 1995, having first named it Oak. Option B is wrong because Bjarne Stroustrup extended C with classes and objects and named the result C++, so he is the creator of C++ and not of C. Option D is wrong because Guido van Rossum created Python and released the first version in 1991. Examiners set this as a match-the-pair question with all four names in one column, so learn the set together: Ritchie for C, Stroustrup for C++, Gosling for Java, van Rossum for Python, Backus for FORTRAN and Wirth for Pascal.

The correct answer is B, Infrared. Infrared communication, the old IrDA link of television remote controls and early mobile phones, uses light just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum. Light of that wavelength is stopped by any opaque object, so the transmitter and the receiver must point at each other with nothing in between, and the range is only a metre or two. Option A, Bluetooth, uses 2.4 GHz radio waves that bend around and pass through ordinary walls, which is why a headset still works with a phone in a pocket. Option C, Wi-Fi, also uses radio and is in fact chosen in the 2.4 GHz band precisely because it penetrates walls better than 5 GHz. Option D, Zigbee, is a low power radio mesh on 802.15.4 that is designed to relay signals from node to node around obstacles. Infrared's need for line of sight is the reason Bluetooth replaced it for device links.

The correct answer is B, the Information Technology Act, 2000. It is India’s first cyberlaw, and it is the statute that gave legal recognition to electronic records and to digital and electronic signatures, so that a contract concluded online is as enforceable as one written on paper and a department may accept a filing or issue a licence electronically. That recognition is exactly what electronic commerce needs, which is why the Act is described as providing its legal infrastructure; it also created the Controller of Certifying Authorities and was amended in 2008 to cover data protection, cyber terrorism and interception. Options A, C and D are wrong because no Information Technology Act was passed in 1996, 1998 or 1990; they are near years offered to test whether the candidate remembers the exact one. Note that 2000 is also the year in which the United Nations model law on electronic commerce was being adopted widely.

The correct answer is B, coaxial cable. The BNC connector is the bayonet-fitting plug that is pushed on and given a quarter turn to lock, and it terminates a coaxial cable, the cable with a central copper conductor, an insulating layer, a braided metal shield and an outer jacket. It is seen on older network cabling, on television and on test instruments. Option A is wrong because twisted pair cable ends in the modular RJ-45 connector for Ethernet or RJ-11 for telephone lines. Option C is wrong because optical fibre uses SC, ST and LC connectors, which align the fibre core precisely so that light passes across the joint. Option D is wrong because a SATA data cable has its own flat seven-pin keyed connector that plugs into the drive and the motherboard, and is used only inside the cabinet.

The correct answer is B, John McCarthy. The American computer scientist John McCarthy used the phrase artificial intelligence in the proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, the meeting generally treated as the birth of the subject as a separate field, and he is therefore called the father of artificial intelligence; he also created the programming language LISP, long used for such work. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing came earlier and asked the deeper question whether machines can think, giving the Turing test in 1950, but he did not use the term artificial intelligence. Option C 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, not of artificial intelligence. Option D is wrong because Marvin Minsky, although a founder of the field and a participant at Dartmouth, did not coin the name. Keep the two fatherhoods apart: Babbage for the computer, McCarthy for artificial intelligence.

The correct answer is B, frequency hopping spread spectrum. A Bluetooth link does not stay on one frequency. Master and slave agree on a pseudo random sequence and jump together between the narrow channels of the 2.4 GHz band many hundreds of times a second. If one channel is occupied by a Wi-Fi network or a microwave oven, only the packets that landed there are lost and are resent on the next hop, and an eavesdropper who does not know the sequence cannot follow the conversation. Option A is wrong because a single fixed channel is exactly what hopping avoids. Option C, wavelength division multiplexing, is a technique of optical fibre in which several colours of laser light share one strand; it has no place in radio. Option D is wrong on both counts: Bluetooth uses digital modulation, not plain amplitude modulation, and it works in an unlicensed band that needs no spectrum licence.

The correct answer is B, it can be read without line of sight and many tags at a time. A barcode must be presented squarely to a scanner, one item at a time, and a torn or dirty label fails. An RFID tag answers a radio signal through cardboard, cloth and plastic, so a whole carton or a shelf of library books can be counted in one sweep, and the vehicle need not stop at a toll gantry. Option A is wrong because a printed barcode costs almost nothing while even a cheap passive tag costs several rupees, and that cost is the main reason barcodes survive on low value goods. Option C is wrong and is in fact the opposite of a strength: many RFID tags are rewritable, so the data on them can be updated during the journey of the goods. Option D is wrong because reading a tag on a moving object is one of the technology's defining uses, as FASTag shows.