SSC CGL GK Questions 2026

Each address line can be either 0 or 1, so n address lines give two raised to the power n distinct combinations, and each combination is one memory address.

The address bus carries only the address of the memory location or the input-output port that the processor wants to use, and that address always travels outwards from the processor to memory, never back; a bus that carries signals in one direction only is unidirectional.

In 1945 John von Neumann described a design in which a computer's instructions and its data are both held in the same memory in the same binary form, so that the machine can be given a new task simply by loading a new program instead of being rewired.

The program counter, sometimes called the instruction pointer, always holds the memory address of the next instruction the processor will fetch, and it is incremented automatically as each instruction is taken up so that execution moves forward in order; a jump or branch instruction works simply by loading a new…

The ALU is the part of the processor that actually does the work on data: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the arithmetic side, and comparison along with the logical operations AND, OR and NOT on the logic side.

Cache is a small quantity of very fast static RAM placed between the processor and main memory to hold the instructions and data most likely to be needed next, and of the options given it has the shortest access time; only the registers inside the processor itself are faster.

Read Only Memory is the permanent or non-volatile memory of a computer: its contents are written once and survive when the power is switched off, which is why the BIOS firmware that starts the machine and runs the power-on self-test is stored in it.

A byte is made up of eight bits, so half a byte is four bits, and four bits together are called a nibble.

A microprocessor is named after the width of its data bus, that is, the number of bits it can carry in and out in a single operation.

India After Gandhi, published in 2007, is Ramachandra Guha's history of the Indian republic from independence onwards, covering partition, the integration of the princely states, the making of the Constitution, the wars, the Emergency and the economic changes that followed.

The Natyashastra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is the foundational text of Indian performing arts, covering the stage, acting, gesture, costume, music and above all the theory of rasa, the aesthetic flavours a performance should produce; every classical dance form traces its grammar to it.

Banabhatta was the court poet of Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the seventh century, and his Harshacharita is a biography in ornate Sanskrit prose that is a major source for the reign, alongside the account left by the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang.

Arthur Llewellyn Basham, a British historian of ancient India, published The Wonder That Was India in 1954 as a survey of Indian civilisation before the coming of the Muslims, and it remains one of the most widely read introductions to the subject; a companion second volume covering the medieval period…

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, is credited with the Arthashastra, a manual in fifteen books covering administration, taxation, law, espionage, diplomacy and war, and traditionally linked with the rise of Chandragupta Maurya.

Kalhana composed the Rajatarangini, the river of kings, in Sanskrit verse in the twelfth century. It traces the rulers of Kashmir in sequence, weighs inscriptions, coins and earlier chronicles as evidence, and is therefore usually described as the first work of Indian historical writing in the modern sense.

The Mimamsa Sutra, also called the Purva Mimamsa Sutra, was composed by the sage Jaimini and is the founding text of the Mimamsa school, one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy; it is concerned with the correct interpretation of the ritual portions of the Vedas and with the…

The Kathasaritsagara, whose name means the ocean of the streams of story, was composed in Sanskrit verse in the eleventh century by Somadeva of Kashmir for the queen Suryavati, and it is a vast frame narrative drawing on the lost Brihatkatha of Gunadhya; the Vetala Panchavimshati, known in Hindi as…

The Ashtadhyayi, which means eight chapters, is Panini's grammar of Sanskrit and the oldest surviving grammar of any Indian language; its roughly four thousand rules describe the language with a precision that modern linguists still study.

The Chinese Buddhist monk Hiuen Tsang, whose name is also written Xuanzang, travelled in India during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century, studied at Nalanda and recorded what he saw in the Si-yu-ki, the Records of the Western World, which remains the fullest description of India in that…

Kavirajamarga, written in the ninth century and attributed to the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha the First, is a treatise on poetics and is the earliest surviving literary work in the Kannada language, which is why it is quoted in every question on the beginnings of regional literature.