Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

February 1955 5-a-day

Every sheet in February 1955

The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.

  1. 1st February 1955State one reason a small business might choose to use open source software instead of proprietary (closed source) software.
  2. 2nd February 1955A FOR loop runs: total = 0, FOR i = 1 TO 4, total = total + i, NEXT i. State the value of total after the loop finishes.
  3. 3rd February 1955State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  4. 4th February 1955State the typical maximum capacity of a single-layer DVD.
  5. 5th February 1955Define the term protocol.
  6. 6th February 1955State what is meant by a syntax error.
  7. 7th February 1955Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  8. 8th February 1955What type of utility software reorganises files on a hard disk so fragmented parts are stored closer together?
  9. 9th February 1955Calculate the maximum number of comparisons required by a binary search on a sorted list of 512 items.
  10. 10th February 1955Given P = 0 and Q = 1, state the value of P OR Q.
  11. 11th February 1955Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  12. 12th February 1955A network administrator is connecting 10 computers in a server room. Calculate the number of cables needed for a full mesh topology, and state the number needed for a star topology with one central switch.
  13. 13th February 1955Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  14. 14th February 1955Convert the 4-bit binary number 1101 to denary.
  15. 15th February 1955Two CPUs are compared for a task optimised for multiple cores: CPU A has 2 cores at 4.2 GHz; CPU B has 6 cores at 3.0 GHz. Explain which CPU is likely to perform better for this task.
  16. 16th February 1955State why an organisation might employ penetration testers to test its network.
  17. 17th February 1955Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  18. 18th February 1955State one example of a file format that commonly uses lossy compression.
  19. 19th February 1955State how many bits are in one byte, and how many bytes are in one kibibyte (KiB).
  20. 20th February 1955State whether the source code of proprietary (closed source) software is normally available for the public to view.
  21. 21st February 1955Write one line of pseudocode that converts the string stored in heightInput into a real number and stores it in a variable called height.
  22. 22nd February 1955A function is defined as: FUNCTION addTax(price) RETURN price x 1.2 ENDFUNCTION. Another line of code runs: total <- addTax(20) + addTax(30). Trace both function calls and state the final value of total.
  23. 23rd February 1955Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  24. 24th February 1955Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  25. 25th February 1955Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  26. 26th February 1955A table called staff has fields staffId, name, department and salary, storing these records: staffId | name | department | salary, 1 | Ben | Sales | 24000, 2 | Chloe | IT | 31000, 3 | Dan | Sales | 27000. State which staffId(s) would be returned by: SELECT staffId FROM staff WHERE department = 'Sales' AND salary > 25000;
  27. 27th February 1955Each pair from the previous question is stored using 2 bytes. Calculate the compression ratio achieved, given the uncompressed row (1 byte per pixel) uses 8 bytes.
  28. 28th February 1955Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?