Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

September 1981 5-a-day

Every sheet in September 1981

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 1981State whether the source code of proprietary (closed source) software is normally available for the public to view.
  2. 2nd September 1981Write one line of pseudocode that converts the string stored in heightInput into a real number and stores it in a variable called height.
  3. 3rd September 1981State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  4. 4th September 1981Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  5. 5th September 1981Define the term protocol.
  6. 6th September 1981Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  7. 7th September 1981A 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.
  8. 8th September 1981Each 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.
  9. 9th September 1981Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  10. 10th September 1981State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  11. 11th September 1981Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  12. 12th September 1981Calculate the number of cables needed to connect 8 computers in a full mesh topology, where every computer connects directly to every other computer.
  13. 13th September 1981Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  14. 14th September 1981Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  15. 15th September 1981Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  16. 16th September 1981Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  17. 17th September 1981Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  18. 18th September 1981An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  19. 19th September 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.
  20. 20th September 1981Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  21. 21st September 1981Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  22. 22nd September 1981State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  23. 23rd September 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.
  24. 24th September 1981Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  25. 25th September 1981Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  26. 26th September 1981Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  27. 27th September 1981Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  28. 28th September 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.
  29. 29th September 1981Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  30. 30th September 1981Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.