Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1968 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 1968

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 1968An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  2. 2nd December 1968A 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.
  3. 3rd December 1968Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  4. 4th December 1968Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  5. 5th December 1968Write 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.
  6. 6th December 1968A 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.
  7. 7th December 1968Define the term protocol.
  8. 8th December 1968Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  9. 9th December 1968State what a foreign key is used for.
  10. 10th December 1968Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  11. 11th December 1968An 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.
  12. 12th December 1968Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  13. 13th December 1968A 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.
  14. 14th December 1968Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  15. 15th December 1968Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  16. 16th December 1968Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  17. 17th December 1968State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  18. 18th December 1968State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  19. 19th December 1968Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  20. 20th December 1968Define the term 'pixel'.
  21. 21st December 1968Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  22. 22nd December 1968Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  23. 23rd December 1968Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  24. 24th December 1968State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
  25. 25th December 1968A 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.
  26. 26th December 1968Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  27. 27th December 1968A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  28. 28th December 1968A table called books has fields bookId, title, authorId and copiesAvailable. Write an SQL statement that selects the title of every book with more than 2 copies available.
  29. 29th December 1968A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  30. 30th December 1968An 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.
  31. 31st December 1968Complete: NOT 0 = ?