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CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1201) practice questions

8 sample questions from our 300-question A+ Core 1 bank — one from each official domain, with the answer and a full explanation under each. Every question is original, written against the published exam objectives, and quality-checked before it reaches you.

220-1201Beginner

Question 1 · Mobile Devices

Wren Dalgleish, a field auditor at Corvid Freight, reports that her company tablet shows a full battery percentage but shuts off within twenty minutes of leaving the office. When docked it runs all day. A technician confirms the battery reports 41 charge cycles and the device is nine weeks old. What is the most reasonable next action?

  1. A.Replace the charging cable and power adapter with OEM parts
  2. B.Perform a full charge-discharge calibration cycle and recheck the runtime
  3. C.Disable all background app refresh permanently
  4. D.Reseat the tablet's internal battery connector
Show answer & explanation

Answer: B

A battery that reports an inaccurate state of charge on a nearly new cell with low cycle count usually points to a drifted fuel gauge, and a full charge-discharge calibration re-syncs the gauge to the cell's real capacity. Replacing the adapter would not help because the device charges normally and reaches 100 percent; the fault is in reporting, not in power delivery.

Question 2 · Networking

Marlow Ceramics is cabling a new 96-meter run from an intermediate distribution frame to a kiln-monitoring workstation. The path parallels a bundle of 480-volt conduits for about 40 meters. The link must support 1 Gbps. Which medium best addresses the environment?

  1. A.Cat 6a shielded twisted pair bonded to ground at the rack
  2. B.Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair run at 100 meters to allow slack
  3. C.Cat 5e unshielded twisted pair with a plenum jacket
  4. D.RG-6 coaxial with F-type connectors
Show answer & explanation

Answer: A

Shielded twisted pair with a properly bonded drain wire is the standard remedy for a long parallel run beside high-voltage conduit, since the shield gives induced noise a path to ground. Unshielded cable of any category leaves the pairs exposed to that interference, and coaxial does not natively carry Ethernet to a workstation NIC.

Question 3 · Hardware

Corvo Studios builds a workstation for real-time video color grading. The editor complains that scrubbing 8K timelines stutters even though the CPU sits near 30 percent and the GPU near 45 percent. The project files live on a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and 64 GB of RAM is installed with 20 GB free. Which upgrade will most directly address the stutter?

  1. A.Add 64 GB more RAM for a total of 128 GB
  2. B.Move the project media to an NVMe SSD on a PCIe x4 slot
  3. C.Upgrade to a CPU with a higher single-core boost clock
  4. D.Replace the GPU with a model that has more video memory
Show answer & explanation

Answer: B

With processor and graphics headroom to spare and free memory available, the bottleneck is the roughly 150 MB/s ceiling of a mechanical SATA drive, which cannot feed 8K frames fast enough for smooth scrubbing. Adding RAM does not help when 20 GB is already unused, so the storage path is the constraint to relieve.

Question 4 · Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Kestrel Analytics runs a licensing service that must remain reachable if the primary data center loses power. The vendor licenses per instance, and the team wants to avoid paying for a second always-on instance. Which cloud model best matches?

  1. A.A metered on-demand instance launched from a maintained image when failover is declared
  2. B.A load-balanced active-active pair across two availability zones
  3. C.A cold site with the instance image stored and provisioned on demand
  4. D.A warm site with the instance replicated and powered on continuously
Show answer & explanation

Answer: A

Launching from a maintained image only when failover is declared means the organization pays for compute only during an outage, which respects the per-instance licensing and cost constraint. An active-active pair provides the fastest recovery but requires a second running instance and therefore a second license at all times.

Question 5 · Hardware and Network Troubleshooting

A desktop at Gaunt Surveying powers on, shows the vendor logo, then restarts before reaching the operating system, looping indefinitely. The behavior persists with only the boot drive, one memory module, and the CPU installed. Booting from a known-good USB diagnostic environment produces the same loop. What should the technician suspect?

  1. A.A misconfigured boot order in firmware
  2. B.A corrupted operating system boot loader
  3. C.A failed boot drive with unreadable partition tables
  4. D.A failing power supply or motherboard voltage regulation fault
Show answer & explanation

Answer: D

Because the loop reproduces while booting external media that never touches the installed operating system or the internal drive, the fault must lie in hardware common to both paths, and unstable rails under load are the classic cause of a reset at that point. A boot loader or partition problem would produce an error message or would be bypassed entirely by the USB environment.

Question 6 · Mobile Devices

A design contractor connects a USB-C hub to her ultrabook so she can drive two 4K displays, a wired keyboard, and a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet adapter. Both monitors light up, but only one shows an image while the other stays black, and the laptop's own screen keeps working. The hub is rated for DisplayPort Alt Mode. What most likely explains the single working display?

  1. A.The second monitor requires a powered hub with its own AC supply
  2. B.The laptop's integrated GPU cannot render more than one external display
  3. C.The Ethernet adapter is consuming the bandwidth reserved for video
  4. D.The hub is using two-lane DisplayPort Alt Mode, leaving insufficient lanes for a second 4K stream
Show answer & explanation

Answer: D

DisplayPort Alt Mode can allocate either two or four of the USB-C connector's high-speed lanes to video; in two-lane mode enough bandwidth remains for USB 3.x data but not for a second 4K stream. The Ethernet adapter rides the USB data lanes, which are separate from the DisplayPort lanes, so it is not competing for video bandwidth.

Question 7 · Networking

A branch office of Fenwick Dental uses 192.168.40.0/26 for staff PCs. The office manager wants to add 40 more IP-enabled dental sensors on that same subnet without renumbering existing hosts. What must the technician do?

  1. A.Enable DHCP relay so sensors receive addresses from the corporate scope
  2. B.Change the subnet mask to /25 on all devices and expand the DHCP scope
  3. C.Configure the router to perform NAT between the sensors and the staff PCs
  4. D.Add a second DHCP scope of 192.168.40.64/26 on the same VLAN
Show answer & explanation

Answer: B

A /26 provides only 62 usable addresses, so widening the mask to /25 doubles the host range to 126 while leaving the existing 192.168.40.x addresses valid within the larger block. Adding a second /26 scope on the same broadcast domain would hand out addresses that existing hosts consider off-subnet, breaking local delivery.

Question 8 · Hardware

A technician installs two 16 GB DDR5 modules in a four-slot motherboard, placing them in slots A1 and A2. The system posts and reports 32 GB, but synthetic memory bandwidth is roughly half of what the same modules produced in a colleague's identical build. What should be changed?

  1. A.Enable the XMP or EXPO profile in firmware to raise the rated speed
  2. B.Move one module to slot B1 so the pair runs in dual-channel mode
  3. C.Reduce the memory timings manually to tighten latency
  4. D.Replace the modules with a single 32 GB stick to avoid mismatch
Show answer & explanation

Answer: B

Populating both slots of the same channel leaves the second memory channel idle, which halves the available bandwidth even though total capacity is correct. Enabling an overclocking profile raises frequency somewhat but cannot recover the missing channel, and board manuals specify staggered slots such as A1 and B1 for dual-channel operation.

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