Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1972 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 1972

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 1972State why an organisation might employ penetration testers to test its network.
  2. 2nd December 1972Explain what happens if a program tries to read index 5 of an array declared with 5 elements.
  3. 3rd December 1972State one example of a file format that commonly uses lossy compression.
  4. 4th December 1972State how many bits are in one byte, and how many bytes are in one kibibyte (KiB).
  5. 5th December 1972State whether the source code of proprietary (closed source) software is normally available for the public to view.
  6. 6th December 1972Write one line of pseudocode that converts the string stored in heightInput into a real number and stores it in a variable called height.
  7. 7th December 1972State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  8. 8th December 1972Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  9. 9th December 1972Define the term protocol.
  10. 10th December 1972Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  11. 11th December 1972A table called products has fields productId, name, price and stock. Write an SQL statement that changes the price of the product with productId 7 to 15.99.
  12. 12th December 1972Each pair from the previous question is stored using 2 bytes. Calculate the compression ratio achieved, given the uncompressed row (1 byte per pixel) uses 8 bytes.
  13. 13th December 1972Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  14. 14th December 1972State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  15. 15th December 1972Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  16. 16th December 1972Calculate the number of cables needed to connect 8 computers in a full mesh topology, where every computer connects directly to every other computer.
  17. 17th December 1972Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  18. 18th December 1972Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  19. 19th December 1972Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  20. 20th December 1972Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  21. 21st December 1972Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  22. 22nd December 1972An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  23. 23rd December 1972A 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.
  24. 24th December 1972Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  25. 25th December 1972Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  26. 26th December 1972State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  27. 27th December 1972A 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.
  28. 28th December 1972Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  29. 29th December 1972Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  30. 30th December 1972Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  31. 31st December 1972Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.