What is a drawback of pulling the power plug to shut down a system abruptly?

• A. Volatile memory will be lost
• B. All running processes will be lost
• C. The /tmp directory will be flushed
• D. Power interruption will corrupt the pagefile

Answer: (A)

The main idea is that RAM is volatile memory. When you pull the power plug, power to RAM is cut, so anything stored there is immediately lost. That includes unsaved work, the current state of programs, and memory-resident data such as temporary keys or credentials. This makes an abrupt shutdown the biggest drawback because you can’t recover or preserve the live system state or any data held in memory. The other effects—processes ending, /tmp behavior, or pagefile concerns—are not guaranteed or universally applicable in all systems, whereas the loss of volatile memory is, by definition, the inevitable consequence of a sudden power loss.