What would you say is the primary purpose of DNS?

• A. To enable communication using domain names rather than IP addresses.
• B. To provide secure encryption for all network traffic.
• C. To manage firewall rules for a network.
• D. To translate domain names to host names only within a local network.

Answer: (A)

DNS acts as the Internet’s address book, letting you reach resources by human-friendly domain names instead of numerical IP addresses. When your device needs to connect to a website or service, it asks DNS to translate the domain name into the IP address of the server, so the lower-layer protocols can route the traffic correctly. This name-to-address resolution is what makes typing a name like example.com workable, without requiring you to memorize numeric addresses. DNS by itself doesn’t provide encryption for all traffic or manage firewall rules; those functions are handled by other technologies. It also isn’t limited to a single local network—DNS can resolve names across the global Internet, though many networks run local DNS servers for internal names as well.