Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science
December 1978 5-a-day
Every sheet in December 1978
The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.
- 1st December 1978Write 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.
- 2nd December 1978A 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.
- 3rd December 1978Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
- 4th December 1978Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
- 5th December 1978State what a foreign key is used for.
- 6th December 1978Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
- 7th December 1978An 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.
- 8th December 1978Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
- 9th December 1978A 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.
- 10th December 1978Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
- 11th December 1978Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
- 12th December 1978Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
- 13th December 1978State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
- 14th December 1978State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
- 15th December 1978A 2D array grid is declared as grid[4][6]. State how many rows and columns it has and how many elements it holds in total.
- 16th December 1978Define the term 'pixel'.
- 17th December 1978Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
- 18th December 1978Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
- 19th December 1978Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
- 20th December 1978State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
- 21st December 1978A 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.
- 22nd December 1978State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
- 23rd December 1978A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
- 24th December 1978A 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.
- 25th December 1978A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
- 26th December 1978An 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.
- 27th December 1978Complete: NOT 0 = ?
- 28th December 1978State how many different values can be represented using 5 bits, and explain your reasoning.
- 29th December 1978State what LAN stands for.
- 30th December 1978Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
- 31st December 1978An 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.