How is the root certificate transmitted to pc? i understand that the purpose of root certificates and CA's is to ensure that the communication parties are who they say they are.

But how is the root certificate acquired? Is it not possible that during the acquisition someone is pretending to be the CA and i get a fake root certificate?

Thanks!
You are correct that getting the root certificate to the end user is a problem. There are two usual ways to solve this:


Out of Band: The root cert is carried by USB stick, or is placed on the system during install, or is pushed by an IT management tool, or by some other non-internet method.
Certificate Pinning: As an example, Firefox includes in its source code the root certs of all the publicly trusted SSL CAs. When you connect to an HTTPS site, Firefox checks that the root issuing cert matches one of the ~50 that are hard-coded into its source code. If Firefox wants to add / remove / modify one of the pinned root certs, it has to push a security patch to everyone. Since the binaries for Firefox are signed, it is difficult (though I'm sure not impossible) to plant a fake root cert in the list.