Use D for this item. HSRP provides first-hop redundancy by giving a group of routers a shared virtual IP address and virtual MAC address. Hosts use the virtual IP as their default gateway; the active router forwards traffic and the standby router takes over if the active fails. In Cisco CCNA 200-301 v1.1, IP Connectivity questions frequently test the practical boundary between similar features: what the feature does, where it is configured, and what problem it is meant to solve. HSRP is not route load balancing, Layer 2 flooding, or per-packet distribution across routed links. A clean way to validate the answer is to map the wording of the scenario to the actual device function. If the feature supplies addressing, forwarding, authentication, trunking, route selection, or controller communication, the answer must match that function exactly rather than a nearby protocol name.