Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1973 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 1973

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 1973Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  2. 2nd December 1973Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  3. 3rd December 1973Write 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.
  4. 4th December 1973A 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.
  5. 5th December 1973Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
  6. 6th December 1973Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  7. 7th December 1973State what a foreign key is used for.
  8. 8th December 1973Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  9. 9th December 1973An 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.
  10. 10th December 1973Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  11. 11th December 1973A 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.
  12. 12th December 1973Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  13. 13th December 1973Give one advantage and one disadvantage of using a compiler.
  14. 14th December 1973Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  15. 15th December 1973State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  16. 16th December 1973State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  17. 17th December 1973Write a loop in pseudocode that outputs every element of a 1D array named names of length 6.
  18. 18th December 1973Define the term 'pixel'.
  19. 19th December 1973Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  20. 20th December 1973Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  21. 21st December 1973Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  22. 22nd December 1973State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
  23. 23rd December 1973A 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.
  24. 24th December 1973A 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?
  25. 25th December 1973A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  26. 26th December 1973A 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.
  27. 27th December 1973A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  28. 28th December 1973An 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.
  29. 29th December 1973Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  30. 30th December 1973State how many different values can be represented using 5 bits, and explain your reasoning.
  31. 31st December 1973State what LAN stands for.