A program is a/an ____ entity.

Concept: In operating-systems terminology, a process is an active entity - a program in execution, with its own state (held in a Process Control Block), holding CPU time and memory as it runs. A program is a passive entity: it is just the static set of instructions (code) stored in secondary storage, with no execution state of its own.

Application: The question asks what kind of entity a program is. A program sitting on disk performs no computation, holds no CPU time, and has no runtime state - it becomes active only when the operating system loads it into memory and creates a process to run it. So a program by itself is a passive entity.

Cross-check: This matches the standard operating-systems definition: a program is a passive entity and a process is an active entity. The other listed terms do not fit here: dormant describes an entity that has already been active at some point and is now temporarily suspended (for example, a sleeping process), while hyperactive and active both describe ongoing or heightened activity - neither applies to code that has not been executed at all.