Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

September 1977 5-a-day

Every sheet in September 1977

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

  1. 1st September 1977Write 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.
  2. 2nd September 1977A 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.
  3. 3rd September 1977Define the term protocol.
  4. 4th September 1977Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  5. 5th September 1977State what a foreign key is used for.
  6. 6th September 1977Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  7. 7th September 1977An 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.
  8. 8th September 1977Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  9. 9th September 1977A 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.
  10. 10th September 1977Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  11. 11th September 1977Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  12. 12th September 1977Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  13. 13th September 1977State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  14. 14th September 1977State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  15. 15th September 1977Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  16. 16th September 1977Define the term 'pixel'.
  17. 17th September 1977Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  18. 18th September 1977Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  19. 19th September 1977Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  20. 20th September 1977State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
  21. 21st September 1977A 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.
  22. 22nd September 1977Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  23. 23rd September 1977A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  24. 24th September 1977A 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.
  25. 25th September 1977A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  26. 26th September 1977An 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.
  27. 27th September 1977Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  28. 28th September 1977State how many different values can be represented using 5 bits, and explain your reasoning.
  29. 29th September 1977State what LAN stands for.
  30. 30th September 1977A program compiles and runs but always outputs an average that is too small. State the type of error and explain why the translator did not report it.