Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1958 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 1958

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

  1. 1st December 1958Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  2. 2nd December 1958Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  3. 3rd December 1958Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  4. 4th December 1958Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  5. 5th December 1958A 2D array grid is declared as grid[4][6]. State how many rows and columns it has and how many elements it holds in total.
  6. 6th December 1958An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  7. 7th December 1958A CPU's cache has a hit rate of 80%. During a task the CPU makes 4000 requests for data. Calculate the number of cache hits and cache misses.
  8. 8th December 1958Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  9. 9th December 1958Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  10. 10th December 1958Write the pseudocode header and body for a function called isAdult that takes one integer parameter called age and returns True if age is 18 or over.
  11. 11th December 1958A company backs up its files onto magnetic tape cartridges, each with a capacity of 3 TB. The company needs to back up 20 TB of data. Calculate the minimum number of cartridges needed.
  12. 12th December 1958State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  13. 13th December 1958Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  14. 14th December 1958State what a foreign key is used for.
  15. 15th December 1958Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  16. 16th December 1958An array called items contains [12, 45, 7, 30, 19] at indices 0 to 4. Describe how a linear search would locate the value 30, stating the number of comparisons needed.
  17. 17th December 1958Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  18. 18th December 1958A pseudocode algorithm is: count <- 0, x <- 10, WHILE x > 0, count <- count + 1, x <- x - 3, ENDWHILE, OUTPUT count. Complete a trace table for x and count, laid out as x | count, then state the value output.
  19. 19th December 1958Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  20. 20th December 1958Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
  21. 21st December 1958Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  22. 22nd December 1958State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  23. 23rd December 1958State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  24. 24th December 1958Trace this algorithm with data = [4, 9, 2, 9, 7] and state the final output. total = 0; count = 0; for i = 0 to 4: if data[i] > 5 then total = total + data[i] and count = count + 1; next i; print(total, count).
  25. 25th December 1958Define the term 'pixel'.
  26. 26th December 1958Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  27. 27th December 1958Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  28. 28th December 1958Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  29. 29th December 1958State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
  30. 30th December 1958A 1 TB hard disk drive costs 40 pounds. A 500 GB solid-state drive costs 60 pounds. Calculate the cost per gigabyte of each device, and state which is cheaper per GB. Use 1 TB = 1000 GB.
  31. 31st December 1958Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.