Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

India's first experimental satellite launch vehicle is the SLV-3.

The Satellite Launch Vehicle-3, a four-stage all-solid rocket developed at ISRO under A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as project director, could place payloads of about 40 kg in low Earth orbit. On 18 July 1980 it put the Rohini satellite into orbit from Sriharikota, making India a spacefaring nation.

The others came later and carried more. The Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV) was the next step, for 150 kg class satellites. The PSLV is the operational workhorse for much heavier payloads, and the GSLV Mk III, now LVM3, is ISRO's heavy-lift launcher.

Answer: A

Statements A and B are correct, so the answer is Only A and B.

India's supercomputer programme began in the late 1980s, when the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up in 1988 after India was refused the import of a Cray supercomputer (A). C-DAC's PARAM 8000, unveiled in 1991, is regarded as India's first supercomputer (B).

Statement C is wrong: Aaditya is the supercomputer of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, used for weather and climate modelling. BARC's in-house supercomputers are the Anupam series. Any option containing C is therefore wrong.

Answer: D

All three statements are true, so the answer is A, B and C.

The nuclear fuel cycle is the series of industrial processes involved in producing electricity from uranium in nuclear power reactors (A). It begins with mining uranium ore and ends with the disposal of nuclear waste (B), so it covers both the front end, before the reactor, and the back end, after it.

To prepare uranium for a reactor it is mined, milled into uranium oxide concentrate (yellowcake), converted into uranium hexafluoride gas, enriched to raise the share of uranium-235, and fabricated into fuel pellets and assemblies (C). These three statements follow the standard description, so no option leaving one out is correct.

Answer: C

Precision agriculture applies information technology and satellite based technology.

Precision agriculture manages variation within a field rather than treating the whole field alike. It uses satellite positioning (GPS), remote sensing, geographic information systems, soil and crop sensors and data analysis to apply water, fertiliser and pesticides at the right place, time and rate.

Better tools, seed drills or extension strategies can all improve farming, but none of them is what defines precision agriculture, which is the site-specific management made possible by information and satellite technology.

Answer: B

The AutoContent Wizard has three steps between Start and Finish.

It asked for the type of presentation, the output medium and the title and footer, then generated an outline with suggested content. It was removed after PowerPoint 2003.

Answer: D

Email can carry audio, pictures and video - any kind of file.

MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard, encodes binary data into text so it can travel through mail systems designed for plain characters, and marks its type so the recipient's program can open it.

Answer: B

ROM stands for read only memory.

Its contents are fixed and non-volatile, surviving without power, which is why the firmware that starts a computer is held in it.

Answer: A

C is a third generation high-level language.

Dennis Ritchie created it at Bell Labs in 1972 to rewrite UNIX. It is high level in that it is portable and structured, but close enough to the machine to be used for operating systems.

Answer: C

Turning the computer's ones and zeros into characters a person can read is decoding.

The bits are mapped to characters by a code such as ASCII or Unicode, in which each letter has a numeric value - A is 65 in ASCII.

Answer: D

RAM is primary storage.

Primary storage is the memory the processor can address directly and read in nanoseconds. It is volatile, losing its contents when power is removed, which is why work must be saved to secondary storage.