Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

October 1966 5-a-day

Every sheet in October 1966

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

  1. 1st October 1966Define the term protocol.
  2. 2nd October 1966Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  3. 3rd October 1966Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  4. 4th October 1966Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  5. 5th October 1966An 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.
  6. 6th October 1966Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  7. 7th October 1966Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  8. 8th October 1966Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  9. 9th October 1966Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  10. 10th October 1966Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  11. 11th October 1966State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  12. 12th October 1966State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  13. 13th October 1966Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  14. 14th October 1966Define the term 'pixel'.
  15. 15th October 1966Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  16. 16th October 1966Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  17. 17th October 1966Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  18. 18th October 1966A 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.
  19. 19th October 1966A 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.
  20. 20th October 1966Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  21. 21st October 1966A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  22. 22nd October 1966A 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;
  23. 23rd October 1966A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  24. 24th October 1966An 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.
  25. 25th October 1966Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  26. 26th October 1966Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  27. 27th October 1966State what LAN stands for.
  28. 28th October 1966A program compiles and runs but always outputs an average that is too small. State the type of error and explain why the translator did not report it.
  29. 29th October 1966An 8-bit register stores the value 01100000 (denary 96). State the resulting 8-bit binary value after a left shift by 1 place, and state whether an overflow occurs.
  30. 30th October 1966Which CPU register holds the address of the next instruction to be fetched?
  31. 31st October 1966Distinguish between the network security threats known as phishing and pharming.