Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 4

The correct answer is B, 4 bits. A nibble is half a byte, that is four binary digits, and it matters because one nibble is written as exactly one hexadecimal digit, from 0 to F. That is why memory addresses in hexadecimal are read four bits at a time.

Option A, 2 bits, has no standard name in this ladder and is simply a distractor. Option C, 8 bits, is one byte, the space needed to store a single character in the ASCII scheme, and it is the most common wrong choice because candidates confuse the byte with the nibble. Option D, 16 bits, is two bytes, often called a half word on a 32-bit machine. Fix the small ladder in memory: 1 bit, 1 nibble of 4 bits, 1 byte of 8 bits, and then every higher unit multiplying by 1,024.

The correct answer is A, .tmp. A file with the .tmp extension is a temporary file, created by a program while it is working and normally deleted once the work is done. Word processors, browsers and installers make them to hold data they may need for recovery, and Windows keeps many of them in the Temp folder, which can be cleared safely. Option B is wrong because .txt is a plain text file that stores unformatted text and opens in Notepad. Option C is wrong because .tnt is not a standard file extension at all. Option D is wrong because .tar is an archive format from Unix that bundles many files into one, often compressed further as .tar.gz. Questions on extensions come up in every shift, so learn the common ones: .docx for Word, .xlsx for Excel, .pptx for PowerPoint, .exe for a program and .bak for a backup. Exam tip: .tmp is temporary, .bak is a backup and .tar is an archive.

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 D, Ministry of Education. The National Digital Library of India is a single window that brings together lakhs of learning resources, from school books to research papers, and lets a student search them free of cost in many Indian languages. It is developed by IIT Kharagpur under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, a mission of the Ministry of Education; the ministry was called the Ministry of Human Resource Development when the library was launched and was renamed in 2020. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Finance handles the budget, taxes and public spending, not education platforms. Option B is wrong because India has no ministry of that name; Science and Technology is a separate ministry of its own. Option C is wrong because the electronics and information technology ministry runs Digital India, e-governance services and BharatNet, but not this library. Exam tip: National Digital Library of India means IIT Kharagpur, the NMEICT mission and the Ministry of Education.

The correct answer is B, DRAM. Dynamic RAM stores each bit as a charge on a very small capacitor, and that charge leaks away in a few milliseconds, so the memory controller has to read and rewrite every cell continuously. The word dynamic in the name refers to exactly this refresh cycle.

Option A, SRAM, stores a bit in a flip-flop of transistors that holds its state as long as power is supplied, so it needs no refreshing at all; that is what makes it fast enough for cache and too costly for main memory. Option C, ROM, is non-volatile and keeps its contents even without power, so refreshing does not apply. Option D, flash memory, is also non-volatile: it traps charge in a floating gate that holds for years, which is why pen drives and SSDs survive being unplugged. Only dynamic RAM is refreshed.

The correct answer is B, Change Case. In MS-Word 2016 the button marked 'Aa' in the Font group of the Home tab opens the Change Case menu, which rewrites the selected text without retyping it. Its five choices are Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word and tOGGLE cASE, and the keyboard shortcut Shift + F3 moves the selection through the main cases one after another. A is wrong because Text Effects and Typography is the blue glowing 'A' that adds shadow, reflection and outline to text. C is wrong because Clear All Formatting is the 'A' with a small eraser, which strips the text back to plain formatting. D is wrong because Strikethrough is shown as 'abc' with a line drawn through it and simply crosses out the text. Exam tip: in the Font group remember Shift + F3 for change case, Ctrl + B for bold, Ctrl + I for italic and Ctrl + U for underline.

The correct answer is C, Round Robin. In Round Robin scheduling every ready process is given the processor for a fixed period called the time quantum, and when that period expires the process is moved to the back of the queue and the next one is served. Because each user gets a turn within a short and predictable interval, the method is exactly what a time sharing operating system needs.

Option A, First Come First Served, serves processes strictly in the order in which they arrive, so one long job at the head of the queue makes everybody wait. Option B, Shortest Job First, picks the process with the smallest burst time, which gives the lowest average waiting time but starves long processes and needs the burst time to be known in advance. Option D, priority scheduling, selects the process with the highest priority and can starve low priority work altogether.

The correct answer is C, Local Area Network. A LAN joins computers and devices inside a small area such as one room, one building or a campus. It usually runs on Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi, is owned and managed by a single organisation, and gives a high data transfer rate with very few errors, which is why offices, schools and cyber cafes use it. Networks are classed by the area they cover: PAN for one person's own devices, LAN for a building, MAN for a city and WAN for a country or the world, the internet being the largest WAN. Option A is wrong because 'Line Area Network' is not a networking term. Option B is wrong because no class of network is called a 'Linear Area Network'. Option D is wrong because 'Land Area Network' does not exist either. Exam tip: learn the four by rising size — PAN, LAN, MAN, WAN — and remember the LAN is the one limited to a single building or campus.

The correct answer is B, ultraviolet light. An Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory chip carries a small quartz window over the silicon; ultraviolet light shone through that window releases the trapped charge from every cell at once and returns the chip to its blank state, after which it can be programmed again.

Option A, an electrical signal, erases EEPROM, the electrically erasable version, and this is the single most common confusion in the chapter: EPROM needs light, EEPROM needs a voltage, and EEPROM can be erased one byte at a time without removing the chip. Option C, a magnetic field, erases magnetic media such as tape or a floppy disk, not a semiconductor ROM. Option D, infrared radiation, does not carry the energy needed to free the trapped electrons and is only a distractor. Remember also that MROM is written by the maker and PROM can be written once.

The correct answer is C, Ctrl + M. In Microsoft PowerPoint, pressing Ctrl + M adds a new slide right after the one you are on, using the layout of the current slide. Think of M for 'more slides', which makes it easy to recall. Other shortcuts worth knowing in PowerPoint are F5 to start the show from the first slide, Shift + F5 to start from the current slide, Esc to end the show, and Ctrl + S to save. Option A is wrong because Ctrl + N opens a brand new blank presentation, not a slide. Option B is wrong because Ctrl + D duplicates the slide that is selected, copying its content as well. Option D is wrong because Ctrl + I turns the selected text italic, just as it does in Word and Excel. Exam tip: Ctrl + M new slide, Ctrl + D duplicate slide, Ctrl + N new file, F5 to run the slide show.

The correct answer is A, Bell Laboratories. UNIX was developed in 1969 at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and it became the model for almost every multi user operating system that followed. Dennis Ritchie later created the C language, in which UNIX itself was rewritten, which is why the two names appear together in examination questions.

Option B, IBM, built its own operating systems for mainframes and later sold PC DOS, but it did not create UNIX. Option C, Microsoft, was founded in 1975, six years after UNIX appeared, and is associated with MS-DOS and Windows; its own UNIX variant, Xenix, was a later licensed product. Option D, Apple, produced the Macintosh operating system with a graphical interface; its modern system is UNIX based, but Apple did not develop the original UNIX.

The correct answer is D, Both I and II. The Post Office Protocol, best known in its third version POP3, lets a mail client download messages from a mail server, and it works in two modes. In the delete mode the message is removed from the server once it has been downloaded, which suits a person who always reads mail on the same computer. In the keep mode a copy stays on the server after downloading, so the same mail can be read again from another device. POP3 uses port 110, or port 995 when secured with SSL. Option A is wrong because both modes do exist in POP. Option B is wrong because keep mode is not the only one; delete mode is the default in many clients. Option C is wrong because delete mode is not the only one either. Exam tip: POP3 downloads mail and offers delete and keep modes, IMAP keeps mail on the server and syncs it across devices, and SMTP is the protocol that sends mail.

The correct answer is C, 1,024 GB. Every step in the ladder of storage units multiplies by 1,024, because 1,024 is 2 raised to the power 10 and memory is addressed in binary. So 1,024 bytes make a kilobyte, 1,024 kilobytes a megabyte, 1,024 megabytes a gigabyte and 1,024 gigabytes a terabyte.

Option A, 100 GB, would be right only if the units advanced in powers of ten, which is how disk makers advertise capacity but not how examiners count it. Option B, 512 GB, is a common drive size and a power of two, but it is half a binary terabyte, not a whole one. Option D, 2,048 GB, is two terabytes. Learn the chain beyond the terabyte as well, because it is asked: petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, each again 1,024 times the one before it.

The correct answer is D, 50097. Hexadecimal is base sixteen, so the four places of C3B1 carry the weights 4096, 256, 16 and 1 from left to right, and the letters stand for numbers: A is 10, B is 11, C is 12, D is 13, E is 14 and F is 15. Putting the digits in place gives 12 into 4096, which is 49152, plus 3 into 256, which is 768, plus 11 into 16, which is 176, plus 1, and the four terms add up to 50097. Options A and B are far too small, because any four-digit hexadecimal number beginning with C is at least 12 into 4096, that is 49152, so 12197 and 32097 cannot be right. Option C lies in the right range but would need the second digit to be about 11, not 3, since 52097 minus 49152 is 2945, which is about 11 sixteens of 256. Exam tip: fix the weights 4096, 256, 16 and 1 in mind, and remember A to F mean 10 to 15.

The correct answer is B, deadlock. Deadlock is the state in which every process in a set is waiting for a resource that another process in the same set is holding, so none of them can ever move forward without the operating system stepping in. It needs mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no pre-emption and circular wait to occur together.

Option A, thrashing, is a different problem: it happens when the system spends nearly all its time swapping pages between disk and memory and almost none doing useful work. Option C, spooling, is a useful technique, not a fault; output meant for a slow device such as a printer is queued on disk so the processor is not held up. Option D, fragmentation, is the scattering of free memory or disk space into small unusable pieces, which wastes space but does not stop processes from running.

The correct answer is C, spam. Unwanted bulk messages sent to many people to advertise something are called spam. Spam usually arrives as e-mail, but the same word is used for unwanted SMS, blog comments and social media messages. Mail services run spam filters that study the sender, the subject line and the words used, and move such mail to a separate Spam or Junk folder so that it never reaches the inbox. Spam that pretends to come from a bank and asks for passwords or card details is called phishing, and a person who sends spam is a spammer. Option A is wrong because a virus is a harmful program that copies itself into other files and damages data. Option B is wrong because unzip only means opening a compressed file such as a .zip archive. Option D is wrong because a URL is the address of a web page. Exam tip: unwanted bulk mail is spam, while fake mail that asks for your details is phishing.

The correct answer is B, RAM. Random Access Memory holds a bit only while it is powered, whether the cell is a flip-flop in static RAM or a leaking capacitor in dynamic RAM. Cut the supply and everything in RAM is gone, which is why unsaved work is lost in a power failure.

Option A, ROM, is the standard non-volatile primary memory and keeps the bootstrap loader and the BIOS ready for the next start-up. Option C, the hard disk, stores data as permanent magnetic patterns on its platters, so it needs no power to remember. Option D, the pen drive, uses flash memory, which traps charge in a floating gate and holds it for years without a supply. In short, only RAM among the four is volatile; cache, being static RAM, is volatile too, and is the answer when RAM is not listed.

The correct answer is C, ext4. The extended file system family, of which ext4 is the widely used member, was written for Linux and is the default arrangement for storing and naming files on a Linux disk. It supports large volumes and large files and keeps a journal so that a disk can be recovered quickly after an unclean shutdown.

Option A, NTFS, is the New Technology File System introduced by Microsoft for the Windows NT line and used by modern Windows installations. Option B, FAT32, is the older File Allocation Table format used by earlier versions of Windows and still found on memory cards and pen drives; it cannot hold a single file larger than four gigabytes. Option D, exFAT, is also a Microsoft format, designed for flash storage to overcome that four gigabyte limit of FAT32.

The correct answer is C, 4.7 GB. A Digital Versatile Disc uses a shorter wavelength laser and finer pits than a compact disc, so one side with one recording layer holds about 4.7 GB; a double-layer disc of the same size holds roughly 8.5 GB.

Option A, 700 MB, is the capacity of an ordinary compact disc, the figure most often mixed up with the DVD in the examination hall. Option B, 1.44 MB, is the capacity of the 3.5-inch floppy disk, a number still asked because it appears in old syllabuses. Option D, 25 GB, is one layer of a Blu-ray disc, which reads with a blue-violet laser of even shorter wavelength. Learn these four capacities together as a set, because a question often lists all of them and asks for one: 1.44 MB, 700 MB, 4.7 GB and 25 GB.

The correct answer is B, warm boot. A warm boot, also called a soft boot, is the restarting of a computer that is already running, usually through the restart option of the operating system or a reset key combination. The power supply is not interrupted and some of the start-up hardware checks are skipped, so a warm boot is faster than starting from the off state.

Option A, cold boot, is the opposite case: the machine is switched on from a completely powered off state, the full power on self test runs and the operating system is loaded afresh. Option C, logging in, is only the act of proving identity with a user name and password after the operating system is already running, and it does not restart anything. Option D, formatting, prepares a disk for storing data by creating a fresh file system on it and erases what was there.