Study question on daemon threads

[David Fishman]

Hi all,
Please help in understanding the following. Thanks in advance !
One of the questions in the threads chapter in Mughal and Rasmussen's "Programmer's Guide to Java Certification" is this :
Given the following program, which statements are guaranteed to be true ?

public class ThreadedPrint
{
   static Thread makeThread(final String id, boolean daemon)
   {
      Thread t = new Thread(id)
                 {public void run() {System.out.println(id);}};
      t.setDaemon(daemon);
      t.start();
      return t;
   }
   public static void main(String[] args)
   {
      Thread a = makeThread("A",false);
      Thread b = makeThread("B",true);
      System.out.println("End\n");
   }
}

The question asked for two correct answers
(a) The letter A is always printed
(b) The letter B is always printed
(c) The letter A is never printed after End
(d) The letter B is never printed after End
(e) The program might print B,End and A, in that order
Their answers were (a) and (e). The explanation they gave was :

Because the exact behaviour of the scheduler is undefined, the text A,B and End can be printed in any order. The thread printing B is a daemon thread, which means that the program may terminate before the thread manages to print the letter

Here is my confusion - they say that a daemon thread "...is stopped if there are no more user threads running...". Therefore, relating this to their explanation above, the thread printing B might not get to execute if both the main thread and the thread printing A terminate. And, if this could happen, what makes (a) one of the correct answers - how can we
gurantee that the thread printing A will get to execute and print A before it is terminated ?
I can understand that there might be a better chance for A to be printed out of a non-daemon thread, but it seems to me that this is not what the question asked for. Am I missing something ?

[David Weitzman]

can understand that there might be a better chance for A to be printed out of a non-daemon thread, but it seems to me that this is not what the question asked for
A is a non-daemon thread and start() will definately be called before main() terminates, so the JVM cannot halt until it finishes execution. Similarly, I can execute the following code without worrying that the thread will not run because main terminates between the call to start() and when the thread actually begins to execute:

public static void main(String[] args) {
  new Thread(new SomeRunnable()).start();
}

[David Fishman]

Thanks for your reply, David. I now realize that I took the wording of the question too literally - the intention of the question was to recognize guaranteed behavious under normal operation of the JVM. I was thinking along the lines of : what if there is some event in the JVM that halts execution of all threads period ? how then can we really guarrantee the execution of thread A ? etc.