Information and Communication Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

TRAI stands for the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

It was set up in 1997 under the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997, to regulate telecommunication services, including the fixing and revision of tariffs, which had earlier been done by the central government. Its remit was later extended to broadcasting and cable services.

The other expansions are plausible-sounding but wrong: the 'T' is for telecom, which covers telephone, mobile and data services, not television, teleservices or the telephone alone.

Answer: D

SWAYAM stands for Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds.

SWAYAM is the Government of India's platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), launched in 2017, offering courses from school to postgraduate level free of charge, with credit transfer possible for many of them.

The other expansions change 'Study Webs' to 'School Webs' or 'Study Websites', 'Active-Learning' to 'Action-Learning', or 'Minds' to 'Maps'; only option D is the official name.

Answer: C

HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language.

HTML is the standard markup language for web pages. It uses tags, such as the paragraph tag and the anchor tag for links, to mark up the structure of a document, and 'hypertext' refers to text with links to other text.

'Mandatory', 'Mix' and 'Media' are invented expansions; the M stands for Markup.

Answer: A

Public internet access in India began in 1995.

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched internet service for the general public on 15 August 1995. Before that, networks such as ERNET connected only academic and research institutions.

1986 is when ERNET began as an educational and research network, not public access, and 1999 and 2000 fall after private internet service providers had been allowed in, years after public access began.

The service was offered through dial-up connections in a few major cities at first.

Answer: C

The most helpful is Unicode.

Unicode is the international standard that assigns a unique code to every character of every major script, including Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali and the other Indian scripts. Smartphone keyboards and apps use it, so text typed in a regional language displays correctly on any device.

A typewriter is a mechanical machine, multimedia refers to combined text, sound and video, and 'Honey code' is not a character encoding.

Before Unicode, Indian-language text often needed special fonts and could not be read reliably on other devices.

Answer: B

The consortium is e-ShodhSindhu.

e-ShodhSindhu, run by INFLIBNET under the Ministry of Education, provides higher education institutions with access to e-journals, e-books and databases through consortium-based subscriptions.

ShodhGanga is INFLIBNET's repository of Indian theses, not a consortium for e-resources, and 'e-Shodh Yamuna' and 'e-Shodh Saraswati' are not real initiatives.

Answer: D

SWAYAM is developed for all the above subjects.

SWAYAM offers courses across disciplines: engineering and technology, humanities and social sciences, management, sciences, law and more, from school to postgraduate level, through national coordinators such as NPTEL, UGC-CEC, IGNOU and IIM Bangalore.

Limiting it to technical, humanities or management subjects alone describes only one part of what the platform offers.

Courses on SWAYAM are free to study, and a certificate is issued on passing a proctored examination, for which a fee may be charged.

Answer: C

The correct pair is Kbps - unit of data transfer rate.

Kbps means kilobits per second, a rate at which data is transmitted over a network or connection.

The other pairs are wrong: a pixel (px) is a picture element, the unit of image resolution, not of focus; an HDD is a hard disk drive, a storage device; and GHz (gigahertz) is a unit of frequency, used for processor clock speed, not memory storage.

Answer: B

It primarily means You are accessing a secure communication.

HTTPS is HTTP over TLS/SSL: the data exchanged between the browser and the website is encrypted, and the site's identity is verified by a certificate. This protects passwords and payment details from interception.

The 'S' stands for secure, not speed, a 'single date line' or smartphones; HTTPS can even add a little overhead to a connection.

Answer: D

The correct order is Wikipedia, Gmail, YouTube, Instagram.

1. Wikipedia was launched in January 2001.
2. Gmail was launched (as an invitation-only beta) in April 2004.
3. YouTube went live in 2005.
4. Instagram was launched in October 2010.

Option (b) puts YouTube before Gmail, and the options starting with YouTube or Gmail ignore that Wikipedia is the oldest of the four.