Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science
February 1981 5-a-day
Every sheet in February 1981
The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.
- 1st February 1981Describe what a nested loop does when it processes a 2D array.
- 2nd February 1981An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
- 3rd February 1981A 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.
- 4th February 1981Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
- 5th February 1981Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
- 6th February 1981State the key difference between a procedure and a function.
- 7th February 1981A 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.
- 8th February 1981Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
- 9th February 1981Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
- 10th February 1981Give one advantage of a relational database over a flat-file database.
- 11th February 1981Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
- 12th February 1981An 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.
- 13th February 1981Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
- 14th February 1981Convert the hexadecimal number 3F to denary.
- 15th February 1981Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
- 16th February 1981Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
- 17th February 1981Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
- 18th February 1981State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
- 19th February 1981State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
- 20th February 1981A 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.
- 21st February 1981Define the term 'pixel'.
- 22nd February 1981Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
- 23rd February 1981Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
- 24th February 1981Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
- 25th February 1981A programmer wants any syntax error in their program to be reported before the program starts running at all. State whether a compiler or an interpreter behaves this way, and explain why.
- 26th February 1981A 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.
- 27th February 1981State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
- 28th February 1981A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?