(You create a topic with five partitions.

The Apache Kafka documentation explains that Kafka’s parallelism model is based on topic partitions and consumer groups. Within a single consumer group, each partition can be assigned to at most one consumer at a time. As a result, the maximum level of parallelism for a consumer group is equal to the number of partitions in the topic.

In this scenario, the topic has five partitions, which means that up to five consumers in the same consumer group can actively consume data in parallel. If more than five consumers are added, the extra consumers will remain idle because there are no additional partitions to assign.

Option B is incorrect because Kafka does not enforce equal message consumption across partitions; message distribution depends on producers and partitioning strategy. Option C is false because partitions may be hosted on different brokers, and consumers fetch data from multiple brokers. Option D is incorrect because a single partition cannot be consumed by multiple consumers within the same group simultaneously.

Therefore, the only valid assumption is that a maximum of five consumers can actively consume messages in the same consumer group.

=========================