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 2...

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