Which of the following is the physical component of a computer system?

• A. Operating system
• B. Application
• C. Hardware
• D. Data

Answer: (C)

Identifying the physical part of a computer system focuses on hardware—the tangible components you can touch, such as the processor, memory, storage, and input/output devices. The operating system and applications are software, which are sets of instructions that run on that hardware. Data, meanwhile, is information stored or processed and represented as bits within the hardware or software, but it isn’t a physical component itself. So hardware is the correct choice because it names the actual physical parts of a computer, whereas software and data refer to non-physical concepts.