Computer Internet Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: Formatting tool bar

Word displays the Standard and Formatting toolbars by default. The Drawing and Forms toolbars have to be switched on.

Answer: D

Correct answer: is a grid organized in columns and rows

A table is by definition a grid of rows and columns. The other three statements are true of tables but describe what can be done with one rather than what it is.

Answer: D

Correct answer: A network covering a small area such as an office or building

A LAN, or Local Area Network, connects devices within a small area - a room, a building, a campus - typically over Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi, and typically owned and administered by one organisation. The classification by geographic scale runs: PAN for a personal area of a few metres, as with Bluetooth; LAN for a building or campus; MAN for a metropolitan area such as a city; and WAN for anything larger, of which the internet is the largest example. The differences are not only of size. A LAN has high bandwidth, low latency and low error rates because the distances are short and the medium is owned; a WAN uses leased lines or public infrastructure and is slower and less reliable in proportion. A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel across a public network so that a remote device behaves as though it were on a private LAN.

Answer: D

Correct answer: To coordinate domain names and IP address allocation globally

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers oversees the domain name system and the distribution of IP address blocks to regional registries. Web standards are the separate business of the W3C and the IETF.

Answer: D

Correct answer: HyperText Transfer Protocol

HTTP is the HyperText Transfer Protocol, the rules by which a web browser requests a page and a server returns it. It was devised by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN around 1989 along with HTML and URLs, the three components of the Web. It is stateless: each request is independent, and the server retains nothing between them. Sessions and logins are therefore built on top of it using cookies or tokens. Requests use methods, of which GET retrieves a resource and POST submits data, and responses carry a status code - 200 for success, 301 for a permanent redirect, 404 for not found, 500 for a server error. HTTPS is the same protocol carried inside a TLS-encrypted connection, so that the content cannot be read or altered in transit. It is now the default, and browsers mark plain HTTP as insecure.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Internet Protocol address, identifying a device on a network

An IP address - Internet Protocol address - identifies a device on a network so that data can be routed to it. Two versions are in use. IPv4 uses 32 bits, written as four numbers from 0 to 255 such as 192.168.1.1, giving about 4.3 billion addresses - which have run out. IPv6 uses 128 bits written in hexadecimal groups, giving a number large enough that exhaustion is not a concern. Addresses divide into public ones, unique across the internet, and private ones such as the 192.168 and 10.x ranges, which are reused inside local networks and translated at the boundary by NAT - the main reason IPv4 has lasted so long. They may be static, fixed by configuration, or dynamic, assigned by a DHCP server on joining. A MAC address is different: it identifies the hardware interface itself and does not change with the network.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Format a main document

The merge process is: identify the main document, prepare the data source, insert the merge fields, preview the result and complete the merge. Formatting the main document is ordinary editing and is not one of the steps the wizard defines.

Answer: D

Correct answer: The maximum rate at which data can be transferred

Bandwidth is the maximum rate at which data can be carried, measured in bits per second - Mbps or Gbps. It is a measure of capacity, not of speed in the everyday sense. It should be distinguished from two related quantities that users often conflate with it. Latency is the delay before data begins to arrive, measured in milliseconds; a satellite link may have high bandwidth and terrible latency, which is why it is poor for video calls but fine for downloads. Throughput is the rate actually achieved, which is always less than the bandwidth because of protocol overhead, congestion and retransmission. The analogy usually offered is a pipe: bandwidth is its width, latency is the time for water to travel its length, and throughput is what actually comes out. Note the unit trap: network speeds are quoted in bits per second and file sizes in bytes, so a 100 Mbps link transfers about 12.5 MB per second.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Use the vertical and horizontal scroll bars

Scrolling changes what is shown without moving the insertion point, so typing would still occur where the cursor was left. Using the keyboard or the page buttons moves the cursor as well.

Answer: D

Correct answer: SMTP

SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is used to send mail - from a client to its server, and from server to server across the internet. The retrieval protocols are different, and the pair is worth distinguishing. POP3 downloads messages to one device and by default removes them from the server, which suits a single machine. IMAP leaves messages on the server and synchronises state - read, filed, deleted - across every device, which is why it is the standard for anyone reading mail on both a phone and a computer. The mnemonic is that SMTP sends and the others fetch. SMTP was designed without authentication, which is the root of the spam problem; the modern remedies are authenticated submission on port 587 and the sender-verification schemes SPF, DKIM and DMARC. FTP transfers files and has nothing to do with mail.