Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

July 1970 5-a-day

Every sheet in July 1970

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

  1. 1st July 1970Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  2. 2nd July 1970Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  3. 3rd July 1970Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  4. 4th July 1970An 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.
  5. 5th July 1970Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  6. 6th July 1970Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  7. 7th July 1970Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  8. 8th July 1970State why a program written in a high level language must be translated.
  9. 9th July 1970Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  10. 10th July 1970State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  11. 11th July 1970State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  12. 12th July 1970Describe what a nested loop does when it processes a 2D array.
  13. 13th July 1970Define the term 'pixel'.
  14. 14th July 1970Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  15. 15th July 1970Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  16. 16th July 1970Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  17. 17th July 1970A 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.
  18. 18th July 1970A 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.
  19. 19th July 1970Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
  20. 20th July 1970A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  21. 21st July 1970A 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;
  22. 22nd July 1970A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  23. 23rd July 1970An 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.
  24. 24th July 1970Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  25. 25th July 1970Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  26. 26th July 1970State what LAN stands for.
  27. 27th July 1970Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  28. 28th July 1970An 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.
  29. 29th July 1970Which CPU register holds the address of the next instruction to be fetched?
  30. 30th July 1970Distinguish between the network security threats known as phishing and pharming.
  31. 31st July 1970A 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.