Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 5

The correct answer is A, the CPU and the main memory. Cache is a small block of static RAM that keeps the instructions and data most recently used by the processor. Because it answers in a fraction of the time DRAM takes, it hides the gap between a fast processor and slower main memory; a request satisfied from it is a cache hit and one that is not is a cache miss.

Option B describes a disk buffer or disk cache, a different arrangement and not what the term cache memory means in this chapter. Option C is wrong because input from a keyboard is handled by a controller and a small buffer, not by the CPU cache. Option D is wrong for the same reason on the output side, where a printer has its own buffer and the operating system uses spooling. Remember the levels as well: L1 lies inside each core, L2 next, and a larger L3 is shared between cores.

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, interpreter. An interpreter reads one statement of the high level program, translates it into machine code and executes it immediately before moving to the next statement. Because it never looks at the whole program in advance, it halts as soon as it meets an error, which makes debugging easy but repeated execution slow.

Option A, a compiler, translates the entire source program in one operation, produces an object file and reports all the errors of the program together, so the translated code runs faster afterwards. Option B, an assembler, is a translator too, but it works only on assembly language, converting mnemonic instructions into machine code. Option D, a linker, does not translate at all; it joins separately compiled object modules and library routines into a single executable file.

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, virtual memory. The operating system reserves an area of the hard disk, called the swap space or the page file, and moves pages a program is not actively using out to it. The program sees one large address space, so software bigger than the installed RAM still runs, though every swap costs time because a disk is far slower than memory.

Option A, caching, does the opposite: it keeps recently used data in a faster memory nearer the processor rather than extending memory onto a slower device. Option C, spooling, queues jobs such as documents waiting to be printed on the disk so the CPU need not wait for a slow peripheral. Option D, defragmentation, rearranges the scattered pieces of files on a disk so they lie in contiguous blocks and read faster; it does not add to memory at all.

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 B, real time operating system. A real time system is judged not only by whether it gives the right answer but by whether it gives that answer inside a fixed deadline. Missile guidance, aircraft control, robotics, industrial plants and life support equipment all use such systems, where a late response is treated as a failed response.

Option A, a batch operating system, collects similar jobs and runs them one after another without any user interaction, so response time is unimportant. Option C, a time sharing system, divides processor time among many users to give each a quick turn, but it offers no hard guarantee for a particular deadline. Option D, a distributed operating system, spreads work across several connected computers so that they appear as one machine; its aim is resource sharing and reliability, not a guaranteed deadline.

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, flash memory chips. An SSD is built from flash memory, itself a block-erasable form of EEPROM, which traps charge in floating-gate cells. Because there is no motor, no platter and no head, an SSD has no seek time, makes no noise and stands up to being knocked about, which is why it has replaced the hard disk in most new machines.

Option A describes the hard disk drive, where data is written magnetically on spinning platters along tracks, sectors and cylinders. Option C describes optical media, the CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc, where a laser burns and reads pits and lands on a reflective layer. Option D describes magnetic tape, the archival medium and the standard example of sequential access storage. All four are secondary storage: the SSD differs in technology, not in its place in the memory hierarchy.

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 C, word processor. A word processor is written to do a job the user wants done, namely to create, edit, format and print a document, so it belongs to application software. Spreadsheets, presentation packages, browsers, media players and billing programs fall in the same class.

Option A, a device driver, is system software; it is a small program that tells the operating system how to communicate with a particular printer, scanner or graphics card. Option B, an operating system, is the chief item of system software and provides the platform on which every application runs. Option D, an assembler, is a language translator that turns assembly language into machine code and is likewise counted as system software, not as an application.

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 B, 1.44 MB. The 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk, the square plastic diskette with a metal shutter, was formatted to 1.44 MB, and that figure is still asked in computer awareness papers because it anchors the small end of the capacity ladder.

Option A, 720 KB, was the capacity of the earlier double-density 3.5-inch disk, a real figure but not the standard one, and it is the distractor most often chosen. Option C, 2.88 MB, belonged to an extra-high-density format that never came into common use. Option D, 10 MB, was the size of early hard disks, not of any floppy. Keep the set in order and no version of this question can trouble you: 1.44 MB for the floppy, 700 MB for the CD, 4.7 GB for the single-layer DVD and 25 GB for a Blu-ray layer.

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, spooling. Spooling stands for simultaneous peripheral operations on line. The operating system writes the data meant for a slow device into a queue on the disk and lets the processor go on with other work, while the device picks jobs out of that queue at its own pace. The print queue of a shared office printer is the everyday example.

Option A, paging, is a memory management method that moves fixed size blocks between disk and main memory to support virtual memory. Option C, caching, keeps recently used data in a small fast memory so that later requests are served quickly; it speeds up access but does not queue device output. Option D, swapping, moves a whole process out of main memory to disk and later brings it back, which is again memory management rather than device handling.

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, EEPROM. Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory is erased by applying a voltage, one byte at a time, while the chip stays soldered in place, which is why it is used for settings that must survive a power cut and yet be changed occasionally, such as the configuration data of a device.

Option A, EPROM, is also erasable and non-volatile but needs ultraviolet light through a quartz window, which erases the whole chip at once and usually means taking it out. Option C, PROM, can be programmed only once by the user and never erased, since programming burns its internal links permanently. Option D, SRAM, is not read only memory at all: it is a fast volatile memory used as cache and loses everything the moment power stops. Note also that flash memory is EEPROM erased in blocks rather than bytes.

The correct answer is B, register. A register is built into the CPU itself and holds the word the arithmetic and logic unit is operating on at that instant, so it is read and written in a single clock cycle. Nothing in the machine is closer to the processor, and nothing is faster.

Option A, cache memory, is the second fastest and is the right answer only when registers are missing from the options; it sits between the CPU and main memory and is built from static RAM. Option C, main memory, is the DRAM the processor addresses directly, which is fast but an order slower than cache because every cell has to be refreshed. Option D, the hard disk, is secondary storage with moving platters and heads, so its access time is measured in milliseconds against nanoseconds for the levels above it. The order to memorise is register, cache, main memory, secondary storage, magnetic tape.

The correct answer is A, Windows. Windows is proprietary, or closed-source: Microsoft keeps its source code private and sells it under a licence that does not let users study, change or redistribute the code. An open-source operating system publishes its source code under a licence that allows anyone to read it, modify it and share it, usually free of cost. Option B is wrong because Ubuntu is a free Linux distribution released by Canonical under open-source licences, widely used on desktops and servers. Option C is wrong because Android is built on the Linux kernel and its core is released as the Android Open Source Project, which is why phone makers can adapt it. Option D is wrong because Linux is the classic example: Linus Torvalds released the kernel in 1991 under the GNU General Public License, and Fedora, Debian and Red Hat all grew from it. Exam tip: closed-source - Windows, macOS and iOS; open-source - Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora and Android.

The correct answer is D, Secondary. A hard disk is secondary storage: the CPU cannot work on its contents directly, and data must first be copied into main memory. Secondary storage is non-volatile, so it keeps files, programs and the operating system even after the power is switched off, and it is far larger and cheaper per gigabyte than RAM, though much slower. A hard disk drive stores data magnetically on spinning platters, with a read-write head moving over the tracks and sectors; solid-state drives, pen drives, CDs and memory cards are secondary storage as well. Option A is wrong because tertiary storage means robotic tape libraries and similar archival systems used for very large backups. Option B is wrong because off-line storage is a removable medium kept away from the computer, such as a tape or a disc on a shelf. Option C is wrong because primary storage means RAM, ROM and cache, which the processor reaches directly. Exam tip: RAM is primary and volatile, hard disk is secondary and non-volatile.