Ch 5Internet and Web — Class 12 Informatics Practices, concept-first.

We live in a connected world. Information is produced, exchanged, and tracked across the globe in real time.

A computer network is not a single, uniform thing. The network inside your school computer lab is very different from the network that connects a bank's branches across the country.

A Local Area Network is a network that connects devices kept within a limited physical distance. The key idea is short range — a LAN does not stretch across cities or countries.

A Metropolitan Area Network, or MAN, is a natural step up from a Local Area Network. While a LAN covers a single building or campus, a MAN extends that reach to cover an entire city or a large town.

A Wide Area Network (WAN) is a network that spans a very large geographical area — much larger than a LAN or a MAN.

A network is only as useful as the devices that connect it. Without the right hardware, data cannot travel from one computer to another, nor can it cross from one network to a different one.

A modem — short for MOdulator-DEModulator — is the device that makes it possible for computers to send and receive data over telephone lines or other analog transmission media.

An Ethernet card is the hardware that physically connects a computer to a wired network. It is also called a Network Interface Card (NIC) or a network adapter.

A repeater is a device that solves a simple physical problem: signals weaken as they travel along a cable. After a certain distance, the signal becomes too weak to be reliably interpreted.

An Ethernet hub is a simple network device that connects multiple devices — like computers or printers — using wired cables.

A switch is a networking device that acts as the central connection point in a Local Area Network (LAN).

A router is a network device that does more than just forward data — it examines the data it receives, decides how to handle it, and can send it across different types of networks.

A gateway is exactly what its name suggests — a “gate” between an organisation’s internal network and the outside world of the Internet.

A network is more than just a collection of wires and devices — the way those devices are arranged matters a great deal. That arrangement is called the topology of the network.

In a mesh topology, every device in the network is directly connected to every other device. This creates a web of point-to-point links, as shown in Figure 5.12 of the textbook.

In a ring topology, each node (computer or device) is connected to exactly two other nodes — one on its left and one on its right. This creates a closed loop, or ring, of connected devices.

In bus topology, every device on the network connects to a single, shared communication line. That central cable is called the bus (or backbone).

In a star topology, every device on the network is connected directly to a central node. That central node is a networking device — typically a hub or a switch.

A network topology is the physical or logical arrangement of devices in a network. A tree topology (also called a hybrid topology) is a hierarchical structure where a central backbone connects multipl…

The Internet is not just a collection of computers. It is the global network of computing devices — desktops, laptops, servers, tablets, mobile phones, and handheld devices — along with peripheral dev…

The Internet is not a single service — it is a platform that enables many different kinds of communication and information sharing.

The World Wide Web — often called the web — is a vast ocean of information stored as trillions of interlinked web pages and other resources.

Email, short for electronic mail, is a method of sending and receiving messages over the Internet. Unlike a phone call, an email does not require the recipient to be online at the same time you send i…

Chatting, also called Instant Messaging (IM), is a way to communicate with people in different geographic locations in real time using text messages.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, allows voice calls (telephone service) to be made over the Internet rather than through the regular telephone network.

A website is something you have almost certainly used — but what exactly is it, technically? At its simplest, a website is a collection of web pages that are linked together and stored on a web server…

We are living in an Internet era where the whole world is connected. A website’s fundamental purpose is to make information available to people at large.

A web page is a document on the World Wide Web that you view inside a web browser. Every page you open — whether it shows text, images, or a video — is a web page.

A web page is not always the same for every visitor. Whether its content stays fixed or changes based on who is viewing it depends on whether the page is static or dynamic.

A web server is the foundation of every website you visit. It is the system that stores a website's files and delivers them to a user's browser when requested.

Web hosting is the service that makes a website or web page available on the Internet, turning it into a part of the World Wide Web.

To host a website, you need to make your website's files available on a computer that is always connected to the internet — a web server.

A browser is a software application whose job is to fetch and display web pages. When you type a web address or click a link, the browser contacts the web server, retrieves the requested data, and ren…

Every web browser has a set of built-in settings that control how it behaves. These settings cover areas like privacy, which search engine to use, how downloads are handled, autofill and autocomplete…

Add-ons and plug-ins are tools that extend and modify the functionality of a browser. Both boost browser performance, but they are fundamentally different from each other.

A cookie is a small text file — a simple string of information — that a website transfers to your browser when you visit it. This file gets stored on your computer by the browser itself.

- A group of two or more similar things or people interconnected with each other is called a network. - A computer network is an interconnection among two or more computers to share data and resources…

Sample papers and previous-year board questions for this subject.