Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 6

The correct answer is A, Port. A port is the socket on a computer where an external device is plugged in, so that the keyboard, mouse, printer, monitor or pen drive can exchange data with the machine. Common ones are the USB port, the HDMI and VGA display ports, the audio jack and the Ethernet port, and older machines had serial and parallel ports. Ports may be physical sockets or, in networking, numbered software ports such as 80 for HTTP. Option B is wrong because a ring is a network topology in which computers are joined in a closed loop. Option C is wrong because a bus is the set of internal wires that carries data, addresses and control signals inside the computer, not a socket for accessories. Option D is wrong because Zip is a file compression format and the name of an old removable disk drive. Exam tip: port connects, bus carries.

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 A, Buffer memory situated between the CPU and RAM. Cache is a small, very fast memory that sits between the processor and the main memory and holds the instructions and data the processor has used most recently. Because reading from RAM is slower than the speed at which the CPU works, the cache saves the processor from waiting, and a request that is served from it is called a cache hit. It is built from static RAM and is arranged in levels, L1 inside the core, then L2 and the shared L3, growing larger and slower at each step. Option B is wrong because ROM holds permanent start-up instructions and is not the memory the cache speeds up. Option C is wrong because the cache serves the CPU, not the path between ROM and RAM. Option D is wrong because MOS names a transistor technology, not a memory unit. Exam tip: speed order registers, cache, RAM, secondary storage.

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 C, Application software. MS Word is a word processor made by Microsoft, and any program written to do a particular job for the user is application software. It runs on top of an operating system and is used to type, edit, format and print documents, saving them with the .docx extension. Software is broadly of two kinds: system software, which runs the machine itself, and application software, which does the user’s work. Option A is wrong because an operating system such as Windows, Linux or Android manages the hardware and gives other programs a place to run; MS Word needs one to work. Option B is wrong because a processing device is hardware, like the CPU, and MS Word cannot be touched. Option D is wrong because input devices such as the keyboard, mouse and scanner feed data into the computer. Exam tip: Windows is system software, MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint are application software.

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, 11. A new blank document in Microsoft Word 2016 opens in the Calibri font at a size of 11 points, and the same pair of defaults is used from Word 2007 through Word 2019. The setting can be seen in the Font group of the Home tab the moment a new document is created, and it can be altered for every future document through the Font dialog box by choosing the font and the size and then clicking Set As Default.

Option A, 10 points, is not the default of any Word version in common use. Option C, 12 points, is the size many offices and universities insist on for a printed report, and it was the default size of the older Times New Roman default in Word 2003, which is why it is the favourite distractor here. Option D, 14 points, is a heading size a user applies by hand and is never the default body size.

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 D, Shift + Space. Pressing Shift together with the spacebar selects the whole row that holds the active cell, from column A right across to the last column of the grid. The row number on the left turns highlighted, and any formatting, deletion or height change you apply next affects the entire row.

Option A, Ctrl + Shift + Space, selects the whole worksheet, which is the same thing Ctrl + A does when the active cell stands outside a data range. Option B, Ctrl + Home, does not select anything at all; it only moves the cursor back to cell A1 from wherever it happens to be. Option C, Ctrl + Space, is the companion of the right answer and selects the whole column instead of the whole row, which is exactly the swap the paper setter is hoping for. Remember the pair together: Shift for the row, Ctrl for the column.

The correct answer is A, F5. In Microsoft PowerPoint, pressing F5 starts the slide show from the first slide, whichever slide you are working on at that moment. The same command sits on the Slide Show tab as 'From Beginning'. Its close partner is Shift + F5, which starts the show from the current slide, and paper setters like to place the two side by side. During the show, Esc ends the presentation, and pressing B or the full stop key turns the screen black until you press it again. B is wrong because Alt + Tab switches between open windows in Windows. C is wrong because Ctrl + P opens the Print option in almost every Office program. D is wrong because Shift + F5 begins the show from the current slide, not from the beginning. Exam tip: F5 = start from the beginning, Shift + F5 = start from the current slide, Esc = end the show.

The correct answer is A, 32. An IPv4 address, which is what the question means by an IP address, is thirty-two bits long. It is written in dotted-decimal form as four numbers separated by full stops, and each number stands for eight bits, or one octet, so it can run only from 0 to 255 — for example 192.168.1.1. Thirty-two bits give about 4.3 billion possible addresses, and because these began to run out, IPv6 was designed with 128-bit addresses written in hexadecimal. Every IPv4 address has a network part and a host part, separated by the subnet mask, and the addresses fall in classes A to E. Option B is wrong because 24 bits is the length of the manufacturer's OUI prefix in a MAC address. Option C is wrong because 16 bits is the size of a port number. Option D is wrong because 12 bits is not the length of any address. Exam tip: IPv4 is 32 bits, a MAC address 48 bits and IPv6 128 bits.

The correct answer is C, HTTP. HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and it is the set of rules by which a browser asks a web server for a page and the server sends it back, which is how data on the World Wide Web is reached. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, who also created the World Wide Web in 1989, and it works on port 80, while its secure form HTTPS uses encryption and port 443. A is wrong because DNS, the Domain Name System, only turns a name such as gk24.in into the numeric IP address of the server. B is wrong because SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol, is used by administrators to watch and manage routers, switches and other network devices. D is wrong because FTP, the File Transfer Protocol, moves whole files between a computer and a server rather than serving web pages. Exam tip: HTTP for web pages, FTP for file transfer, SMTP to send mail, POP3 and IMAP to receive it.

The correct answer is B, F. The hexadecimal system has base sixteen, so it needs sixteen symbols for a single place. The digits 0 to 9 give the first ten values and the letters A to F stand for the remaining six, with A as 10, B as 11, C as 12, D as 13, E as 14 and F as 15. One hexadecimal digit therefore holds exactly four bits, which is why memory addresses, colour codes such as FF0000 for red and machine code are written in hex: a long binary string becomes short and easy to read. Option A is wrong because stopping at C would give only thirteen symbols, too few for base sixteen. Option C is wrong because stopping at B leaves twelve. Option D is wrong because stopping at D leaves fourteen, still short of sixteen. Exam tip: binary base 2, octal base 8 using 0 to 7, hexadecimal base 16 using 0 to 9 and A to F.

The correct answer is B, 010010. The 2's complement of a binary number is found in two steps: flip every bit to get the 1's complement, then add 1. Flipping 101110 gives 010001, and 010001 + 1 = 010010. A quick check confirms it: 101110 is 46 and 010010 is 18, and 46 + 18 = 64, which is 2⁶ for a six-bit number, exactly as it should be. Computers use the 2's complement to store negative numbers and to do subtraction by addition, which keeps their circuits simple. A shortcut also works: copy the bits from the right up to and including the first 1, then flip all the rest. A is wrong because 010011 adds 2 instead of 1 to the 1's complement. C is wrong because 110001 leaves the leftmost bit unflipped. D is wrong because 010001 is only the 1's complement; the final +1 is missing. Exam tip: 2's complement = flip all bits, then add 1; a number plus its 2's complement equals 2ⁿ.

The correct answer is C, Packet filtering. A packet filtering firewall works at the network layer, the third layer of the OSI model, where it reads the header of every incoming and outgoing packet and compares the source and destination IP address, the port number and the protocol against a list of rules, then allows the packet through or drops it. It is the oldest and fastest kind of firewall and needs little memory, but it is stateless: it judges each packet on its own and cannot look inside the data, so it misses attacks hidden in the payload. Option A is wrong because a circuit-level gateway works at the session layer and only checks that the TCP handshake is valid. Option B is wrong because an application-level gateway, or proxy firewall, works at the application layer and understands protocols such as HTTP and FTP. Option D is wrong because network filtering is not a recognised firewall type. Exam tip: packet filter at the network layer, circuit-level at the session layer, proxy at the application layer.

The correct answer is B, To prevent unauthorised access to a private network. A firewall stands between a trusted private network and an untrusted one such as the internet, and checks the data going in and out. Traffic that matches its security rules is allowed and the rest is blocked, much like a guard at a gate. It can be hardware, such as a separate device or a feature of a router, or software, such as the firewall built into Windows. The name comes from the fire-resistant walls in buildings that stop a fire from spreading from one part to another. A is wrong because a firewall does not make the connection faster; checking traffic can even slow it slightly. C is wrong because finding and removing viruses is the job of antivirus software, which works on files already on a computer. D is wrong because storing passwords safely is the work of a password manager. Exam tip: firewall = gatekeeper of network traffic; antivirus = cleaner of infected files.

The correct answer is B, Drupal. Drupal is a content management system, a free program used to build and run websites; it keeps its pages in a database but is not itself a database management system. A DBMS is the software layer that creates, stores, queries and secures data, and the other three names are all DBMS products. Option A, Oracle, is the commercial relational database widely used by banks and large businesses. Option C, MySQL, is the open source relational database that a large share of the web runs on; Drupal and WordPress in fact store their content in a MySQL database, which shows the difference between the two kinds of software. Option D, MS Access, is the small desktop database that ships with Microsoft Office and keeps tables, queries, forms and reports in a single file. Exam tip: Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, SQL Server and PostgreSQL are database managers; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are content management systems.

The correct answer is D, All of the above. A high-level language is written in words close to English and has to be turned into machine code by a compiler or an interpreter, so the programmer need not know the processor at all. All three named languages are of this kind. COBOL, from 1959, was built for business data processing and Grace Hopper was central to its design. PASCAL, designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970 and named after Blaise Pascal, was made for teaching structured programming. BASIC, written by Kemeny and Kurtz in 1964, was the beginners language of early home computers. Options A, B and C are each individually correct but incomplete, and the question asks for the choice that covers every high-level language listed, so the fuller option D is the right one. Exam tip: machine and assembly language are low level, C, COBOL, BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN and Java are high level.

The correct answer is C, Ctrl + tab. In Google Chrome, holding Control and pressing Tab moves to the next open tab on the right, and the pair Control, Shift and Tab moves back to the previous one. Chrome also lets a tab be opened with Control and T, closed with Control and W, and the last closed tab reopened with Control, Shift and T, while Control with a number from 1 to 8 jumps straight to that tab. Option A is wrong because Alt and Tab is a Windows shortcut that switches between open programs, not between tabs inside the browser. Option B is wrong because Shift, Control and Alt together are only modifier keys and do nothing on their own. Option D is wrong because Control, Alt and Delete opens the Windows security screen from which the Task Manager can be started. Exam tip: Ctrl + Tab next tab, Ctrl + T new tab, Ctrl + W close tab.

The correct answer is D, Virtualization. Virtualization creates a software layer over the physical processor, memory and storage of a machine, so that one server can be divided into several virtual machines, each running its own operating system as though it had hardware of its own. The program that makes this possible is the hypervisor. Because a single strong server then does the work of many lightly used ones, organisations buy less hardware and spend less on power, cooling and floor space, which is why it is called the most effective way to cut IT costs. It is also the base on which cloud computing is built. Option A is wrong because artificial intelligence is about machines doing tasks that need human-like reasoning. Option B is wrong because clustering joins several computers to work as one for speed and reliability, not to abstract resources. Option C is wrong because a storage area network is a dedicated network for storage alone. Exam tip: hypervisor runs virtual machines, and virtualization underlies cloud computing.