Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 26 to 35.
Project Natick, conceived at ThinkWeek 2014, tested whether a sealed subsea datacenter could harden reliability while shrinking energy footprints. In 2018 the Northern Isles capsule was sunk 117 feet off Orkney, where cold, stable waters aided heat exchange and coastal proximity promised low-latency services. [I] The team posited that a hermetic steel tube, insulated from oxygen, humidity, and human jostling, would curb failure modes; if this containment scaled, its design tenets might be ported back onshore.
Built by Naval Group and operated with local partners, the unit faced a site infamous for nine-mile-per-hour tides and storm waves topping sixty feet. Deploying and retrieving it required atypically calm weather and a choreographed dance of robots, winches, and barges. [II] Launched gleaming white, the module surfaced two years later stippled with algae, barnacles, and cantaloupe-sized anemones yet showed little hardened accretion. The trial proved such marine operations, though nontrivial, can be orchestrated with industrial discipline.
After hoisting, crews power-washed the hull, sampled the headspace, and found a dry nitrogen atmosphere described as benign for electronics. Inside sat 864 servers and cooling gear; the team reported a failure rate about one-eighth that of land farms. [III] They hypothesize two main causes: suppressed corrosion in low oxygen and the absence of people bumping components. In a lights-out datacenter, early-failing nodes can be retired until a five-year rack refresh, trimming spares logistics while sustaining continuity.
Natick also reframed sustainability and reach. Orkney’s grid – fed by wind, solar, and experimental marine renewables – proved adequate, hinting at leaner power-redundancy designs and future co-location with offshore wind. Azure’s mission-systems group tracks the work for tactical, encrypted edge compute that can be placed almost anywhere. [IV] The team’s results suggest that underwater modules, deployed rapidly and maintained without human intervention, could securely deliver edge services wherever critical workloads arise. If these lessons generalize, subsea practices may catalyze more frugal, resilient land facilities.
(Adapted from Microsoft: “Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably” – Project Natick)
Question 26. The word benign in paragraph 3 mostly means ______.
A. harmlessly mild B. severely toxic
C. moderately abrasive D. wildly erratic
Question 27. What primary reliability outcome did Project Natick report relative to land facilities?
A. It eliminated hardware failures entirely under stormy seas and heavy tidal conditions.
B. Its servers needed fewer spare parts due to easier onsite human interventions.
C. It achieved failure rates roughly one-eighth of comparable land-based server farms overall.
D. It matched land reliability while consuming significantly more energy for cooling operations.
Question 28. According to paragraph 1, the sealed subsea capsule was expected to ______.
A. depend on frequent diver maintenance to calibrate sensors and remove algae
B. keep oxygen and humidity out, reducing corrosion and accidental human disturbance
C. leverage heated currents to accelerate heat exchange beyond submarine plumbing norms
D. harden reliability by isolating components from environmental and handling failure modes
Question 29. Which of the following best summarises paragraph 2?
A. Focuses on marine colonization that compromised hardware and required constant scrubbing at sea.
B. Explains a harsh test site, carefully coordinated retrieval, and relatively light marine accretion observed.
C. Claims crews improvised because unpredictable seas prevented any planned logistics or scheduling reliability.
D. Details a whitening process that repelled growth while robots ran winches entirely without human oversight.
Question 30. What kind of grid powered Orkney during the trial?
A. Fully nuclear and gas-backed B. Diesel-only island microgrid system
C. Wind, solar, experimental renewables D. Coal-dominant mainland supply network
Question 31. Where in the passage does the following sentence best fit?
This proximity would shorten data travel paths for coastal users.
A. [I] B. [II] C. [III] D. [IV]
Question 32. The phrase choreographed dance in paragraph 2 refers to ______.
A. storm surges B. coordinated lifting C. sea anemones D. barge pontoons
Question 33. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A. Underwater datacenters will soon replace onshore facilities because the ocean eliminates all failures permanently.
B. Marine growth presents zero risk to equipment, so protective coatings are unnecessary in future deployments.
C. Nitrogen atmospheres guarantee perfect reliability, regardless of installation site or maintenance practices chosen.
D. Land sites might adopt sealed, low-oxygen enclosures and fewer interventions, trimming failures and power overhead near dependable renewable sources.
Question 34. Which of the following best paraphrases the underlined sentence in paragraph 4?
The team’s results suggest that underwater modules, deployed rapidly and maintained without human intervention, could securely deliver edge services wherever critical workloads arise.
A. Rapidly deployed, unattended subsea units could furnish secure edge capacity wherever mission-critical demand appears requiring low-latency processing.
B. Only large, crewed ocean facilities can provide secure services to distant enterprise customers worldwide requiring continuous human oversight.
C. Edge computing requires permanent human oversight; underwater modules merely supplement traditional warehouse centers without replacing terrestrial infrastructure.
D. Security comes mainly from geography so moving servers offshore alone will protect essential digital workloads from cyber threats.
Question 35. Which of the following best summarises the passage?
A. Marine life threatens servers; thus, the project mostly documents biofouling and cleanup techniques at sea.
B. The trial proves underwater sites are scenic, though practical uses remain speculative and technically remote.
C. Subsea capsules showed strong reliability and sustainability, with lessons for agile, low-touch, renewable-friendly datacenters.
D. Hardware miniaturization matters most; location and power arrangements barely affect overall datacenter dependability.