Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

April 1959 5-a-day

Every sheet in April 1959

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

  1. 1st April 1959Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  2. 2nd April 1959Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  3. 3rd April 1959State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  4. 4th April 1959A 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.
  5. 5th April 1959Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
  6. 6th April 1959Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  7. 7th April 1959Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  8. 8th April 1959Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  9. 9th April 1959An 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.
  10. 10th April 1959Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  11. 11th April 1959Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  12. 12th April 1959Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  13. 13th April 1959Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  14. 14th April 1959Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  15. 15th April 1959State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  16. 16th April 1959State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  17. 17th April 1959A 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.
  18. 18th April 1959Define the term 'pixel'.
  19. 19th April 1959Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  20. 20th April 1959Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  21. 21st April 1959Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  22. 22nd April 1959A 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 April 1959A 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.
  24. 24th April 1959State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  25. 25th April 1959A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  26. 26th April 1959A 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 April 1959A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  28. 28th April 1959An array contains [9, 2, 6], to be sorted using insertion sort. Show the state of the array after each new element has been inserted into its correct position.
  29. 29th April 1959Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  30. 30th April 1959Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.