Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

October 1971 5-a-day

Every sheet in October 1971

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 1971Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  2. 2nd October 1971Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  3. 3rd October 1971An 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.
  4. 4th October 1971Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  5. 5th October 1971Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  6. 6th October 1971Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  7. 7th October 1971Give one advantage and one disadvantage of using a compiler.
  8. 8th October 1971Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  9. 9th October 1971State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  10. 10th October 1971State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  11. 11th October 1971Write a loop in pseudocode that outputs every element of a 1D array named names of length 6.
  12. 12th October 1971Define the term 'pixel'.
  13. 13th October 1971Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  14. 14th October 1971Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  15. 15th October 1971Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  16. 16th October 1971A 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.
  17. 17th October 1971A 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.
  18. 18th October 1971A user reads the same email on a phone and a tablet, and deleting it on one deletes it on the other. Which protocol is in use and why?
  19. 19th October 1971A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  20. 20th October 1971A 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;
  21. 21st October 1971A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  22. 22nd October 1971An 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.
  23. 23rd October 1971Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  24. 24th October 1971Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  25. 25th October 1971State what LAN stands for.
  26. 26th October 1971Name the translator used for assembly language and describe how it differs from a compiler.
  27. 27th October 1971An 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.
  28. 28th October 1971Which CPU register holds the address of the next instruction to be fetched?
  29. 29th October 1971Distinguish between the network security threats known as phishing and pharming.
  30. 30th October 1971Explain what happens if a program tries to read index 5 of an array declared with 5 elements.
  31. 31st October 1971A row of pixels is encoded using run-length encoding as: 3W 4B 3W. State the original row of pixels it represents.