Which operators indicate past values for date filters?

• A. < and <=
• B. > and >=
• C. = and <>
• D. < and >=

Answer: (A)

Filtering by past dates uses comparisons that look at values earlier than a reference date. The appropriate operators are less-than and less-than-or-equal-to. They directly select dates that occurred before the cutoff, and you can choose to include the cutoff date with <= if you want to count today as part of the past relative to the reference.

For example, in a query you might see date_field < CURRENT_DATE to get all dates before today, or date_field <= CURRENT_DATE to include today as well. The other operator sets point to dates that are on or after the reference date (future or same-day), or they test for equality, which doesn’t define a past-only range. Mixing < with >= would produce an inconsistent range that doesn’t cleanly represent past values.