Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1977 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 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 December 1977State one example of a file format that commonly uses lossy compression.
  2. 2nd December 1977State how many bits are in one byte, and how many bytes are in one kibibyte (KiB).
  3. 3rd December 1977State whether the source code of proprietary (closed source) software is normally available for the public to view.
  4. 4th December 1977Write one line of pseudocode that converts the string stored in heightInput into a real number and stores it in a variable called height.
  5. 5th December 1977State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  6. 6th December 1977Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  7. 7th December 1977Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
  8. 8th December 1977Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  9. 9th December 1977A 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.
  10. 10th December 1977Each 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.
  11. 11th December 1977Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  12. 12th December 1977State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  13. 13th December 1977Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  14. 14th December 1977Calculate the number of cables needed to connect 8 computers in a full mesh topology, where every computer connects directly to every other computer.
  15. 15th December 1977Give one advantage and one disadvantage of using a compiler.
  16. 16th December 1977Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  17. 17th December 1977Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  18. 18th December 1977Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  19. 19th December 1977Write a loop in pseudocode that outputs every element of a 1D array named names of length 6.
  20. 20th December 1977An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  21. 21st December 1977A 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.
  22. 22nd December 1977Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  23. 23rd December 1977Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  24. 24th December 1977State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  25. 25th December 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.
  26. 26th December 1977A 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?
  27. 27th December 1977Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  28. 28th December 1977Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  29. 29th December 1977Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  30. 30th December 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.
  31. 31st December 1977Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.