IT Fundamentals Midterm Qs

A security administrator would be responsible for administering which of the following?

A firewall

Which of the following is the largest storage capacity?

4 Gigabytes

T/F: Web developers and web administrators share most of the same tasks.

False

The concept of translating a program from a more readable language like Python or Java into the computer's native machine language is called ...

compilation

Detecting that a computer is running slowly because of a computer virus infection would be an example of which type of IT skill?

Troubleshooting

T/F: It is the user who initiates when and what a computer should do.

True

T/F: You can store a number between 0 and 255 in 1 bit.

False

T/F: Organizations typically only have one system administrator who will be responsible for all aspects of administering the computer systems.

False

T/F: The only difference between a handheld unit such as a tablet device or a smart phone differs from a laptop or desktop computer is that the laptop/desktop has full sized peripheral devices and the handheld unit uses touch screens.

False

T/F: The system administrator of a company would not be responsible for installing software on individual employee's computers.

False

T/F: If a device performs the IPOS cycle, we should consider it to be a computer no matter what the device is.

True

T/F: As computer technology has improved and thus become more complex, the ability to use the computer has been made easier.

True

An IT person would probably be expected to study each of the following topics except for...

… operating systems

… ethics

… the IT person would be expected to study them all

… networking

… programming

… the IT person would be expected to study them all

If users use passwords containing non-alphabetic characters or a combination of upper and letter case letters, this ...

... promotes computer security

T/F: Although an IT student may not learn a variety of programming languages, it is likely that the IT student will learn to program.

Correct answer:

True

T/F: System administrators should know more than one operating system.

True

Which of the following skills would an IT person employ to find and fix a problem with the operating system?

System troubleshooting

The system unit houses the CPU and memory chips, all placed on...

... a motherboard

T/F: As an IT person, one should be someone who enjoys learning on your own.

True

Which of the following could be called a peripheral device?

Printer

T/F: A smart phone should not be considered a computer

False

T/F: Most people who work in IT have 4-year IT degrees.

False

Which of the following types of files would come closest to about 1 MByte in size?

A small black and white image file

Volatility is a property of which of the following?

Memory

An IT person in general would not be expected to handle which of the following tasks?

Monitor employees' files and web browsing behavior to ensure compliance with organizational IT policies

T/F: System administrators will be expected to provide support in the form of documentation and training to the organization's users.

True

Which of the following behaviors might be considered as unethical from the position of a system administrator?

- Accessing other people's files

- Changing data files in the organization's system for one's own gain

- Setting up backdoor accounts

- Reading employees' emails

- All of the above

All of the above

T/F: Computers today are more easily identifiable than computers in the past.

False

The system administrator is responsible for each of the following tasks except...

.... securing a website

A computer system consists of the hardware, software and ...

... users.

T/F: The foreground process is the one that the user can directly interact with.

True

T/F: While any device can issue an interrupt, it is the operate system that handles interrupts.

True

T/F: A virtual machine is hardware.

False

To determine where a given page is stored in memory, the operating system uses ...

... the page table.

Concurrent processing means that the operating system executes processes in an overlapped fashion, which of the following is not a form of concurrent processing?

batch processing

Which of these hardware devices can force the processor to move from one process to another in multitasking?

program counter

timer

redy queue

status flags

program counter

In Linux, the administrator account is called ...

root

Which portion of the operating system can be personalized by the user.

the shell

Bourne is an example of a Linux ...

...shell

Two threads will always share the same ...

… program code

Which of the following forms of processing does not provide any form of interaction with the user but instead requires I/O be handled before/after program execution?

Multiprogramming

If two processes are deadlocked, what is your best move to free them from deadlock?

Kill one of the processes

When two threads need to "meet up" in order to share data, this is known as ...

... rendezvous

During a context switch, what is being switched?

one process' register values for another

one process' pages for another

all of the above

one process' data for another

one process' priority for another

all of the above

T/F: A multithreaded operating system is more efficient than a multitasking operating system when executing threads.

true

The process of swapping is triggered under which circumstance?

a page fault

T/F: with virtual memory, only portions of the running program are stored in memory.

True

Where is swap space located?

hard disk

Which of the following is true in competitive multitasking?

The CPU switches between processes when a timer forces a context switch.

GRUB is an example of ...

boot loader program

Which of the following forms of scheduling will cause processes to wait the minimum amount of time?

shortest job first

T/F: The GUI is both easier to use and provides the user with greater flexibility in issuing instructions while the command line provides the user with the opportunity to write more detailed commands and so is more powerful

False

The use of permissions to control who/what can and who/what cannot access and use system resources is part of which of these operating system roles?

protection

The portion of the operating system that must be resident in memory at all times is ...

the kernel

T/F: the operating system is software.

True

What does an interrupt interrupt?

the CPU during its fetch-execute cycle

If a process generates an address that is part of another process' area of memory, this is known as ...

... a memory violation

Which form of processing would run one process at a time, but when that process requires I/O, the CPU would switch temporarily to another process?

multitasking

In order for the operating system to be able to communicate with a specific piece of hardware, one must install the appropriate ...

... device driver

T/F: In a batch processing system, the operating system would have to schedule the next process to execute.

Correct answer:

True

Which of the following forms or process management did MS-DOS use?

single tasking

If an entry in a page table is listed as not valid, then accessing that page will cause ...

... a page fault

When the CPU moves from one process to another in multitasking, this is known as ...

... a context switch

T/F: Cooperative multitasking and competitive multitasking are the same thing.

false

T/F: The process and the program are the same; the two terms can be used interchangeably.

False

The file system for Windows and Linux are "shapes" like a ...

... tree.

With file blocks distributed across the file system instead of being stored in consecutive disk blocks, accessing the file requires traversing the blocks creating what one might call a ..

... linked list.

In Linux, you would expect to find many of the system administrator programs stored under ...

/sbin

Under which Linux top-level directory would you find the user directories?

/home

The /proc top level directory is different from most other Linux top level directories because it ...

... is writeable by both root and all users.

... is not stored on disk but instead stored in memory.

None of the above: there is nothing different about /proc from other top-level directories.

... never changes so it never has to be backed up.

... is only used if your computer has multiple processors.

... is not stored on disk but instead stored in memory.

T/F: We view the file system from a physical perspective while the operating system manipulates it from a logical perspective.

False

In file compression, lossy compression ...

… Reduces file size by discarding some data.

The time it takes the read/write head to move across the disk to the proper track is called ...

... seek time.

T/F: In both Windows and Linux, partitions are denoted by using different letters as in C: and D:.

False

T/F: In Linux, every top-level directory is located on its own partition whereas in Windows, all of the top-level directories are on the same partition.

False

T/F: A hard link in a file system points at the file while a soft link points at a file's directory entry.

True

If a hard disk contains 4 platters, how many read/write heads will the hard disk contain?

8

Which of the following tasks would not be possible for a system administrator to do on the file system?

Add remote storage to be accessed over network

Encrypt portions of the file system

All of the above are possible.

Mount and unmount specific partitions

Establish disk quotas

All of the above

In Linux, a soft link is called ...

a symbolic link

In Linux, devices like the disk drives, USB drives, network devices and monitor are treated as files. These "files" are stored under which directory?

/dev

T/F: To create a directory, both Linux and DOS use mkdir.

True

You can separately mount and unmount each individual partition.

True

In DOS, which of the following symbols is used to denote a directory in a path?

\

In a linked list, to reach the 5th block, how many links do you have to follow?

4

The zip and tar programs can be used to create ...

... archives

Files are broken into fixed sized units called ...

... blocks.

The surface of a hard disk is broken into which types of regions?

tracks and sectors

Under which Linux top-level directory would you find most of the configuration files?

/etc

Which of the following files stores user account information?

/etc/passwd

Which of the following Linux commands is like the DOS command dir?

ls

T/F: In Linux, you have one inode for every file and directory in your file system.

True

Which of the following files stores the currently mounted file systems (partitions) in Linux?

/etc/mtab

T/F: All files have names although the extension is not required.

True

Mounting ...

… makes a partition available

T/F: User passwords are not actually stored in the /etc/passwd file.

True

File name extensions are primarily used ...

... by the operating system to know what software to use to open the file.

T/F: Disk access time is slower than memory access time.

True

In order to determine which directory you are currently in, which commands would you use respectively in Windows and Linux?

nothing in Windows, and pwd in Linux

In Linux, the system administrator's home directory is stored under ...

/root

In Windows, the Programs top level directory stores applications software. In Linux, the equivalent directory is ...

/usr