An approach that permits the computer to work on several programs instead of one is

This post is in response to Poonam Ghimire. As many others are asking this question repeatedly, I thought of answering it publicly.

Well, looking upon the options, the first one A) On-line thesaurus is completely invalid. There's no need to discuss any further for this option.

Multiprogramming is the allocation of computing resources to more than one concurrent application, job, or user.​ It is the technique devised to make a processor able to run more than one program at a time so that valuable processing resource is not wasted. When the processor is waiting for  an I/O job, it can switch to another process. 

Overlapped Processing is a technique in system designing to increase utilization of the CPU, thus improving system efficiency. A computer system with an overlapped processing capability can increase the use of its central processing unit by overlapping input/output and processing operations​. (Please refer to Instructor's guide, Information processing, second ed. by Marilyn Bohl)

Outline processor is a specialized type of word processor used to view, create, build, modify, and maintain outlines. When loaded into an outliner, an outline may be collapsed or expanded to display as few or as many levels as desired. Outliners are used for storing and retrieving textual information, with terms, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs attached to a tree. So rather than being arranged by document, information is arranged by topic or content. An outline in an outliner may contain as many topics as desired. This eliminates the need to have separate documents, as outlines easily include other outlines just by adding to the tree.

The fourth option here looks irrelevant.  

Now, main confusion is in between option B and Option C, as both appear to enable a computer system to support multiple programs concurrently.

Multiprogramming is related to the technique that makes a processor to run multiple programs and it is achieved through interrupting current program and switch to another program. Though, applications appear to run simultaneously, it is achieved by sharing the CPU time. But the important point here to note is multiprogramming concept is implemented using the overlapped processing concept.

Therefore, when overlapped processing and multiprogramming both options are in possible answers, you should choose overlapped processing as correct answer. 

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