Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

March 1984 5-a-day

Every sheet in March 1984

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

  1. 1st March 1984State whether the source code of proprietary (closed source) software is normally available for the public to view.
  2. 2nd March 1984Write 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 March 1984State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  4. 4th March 1984Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  5. 5th March 1984A 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?
  6. 6th March 1984Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  7. 7th March 1984A 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 March 1984Each 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 March 1984Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  10. 10th March 1984State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  11. 11th March 1984Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  12. 12th March 1984Calculate 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 March 1984Name the translator used for assembly language and describe how it differs from a compiler.
  14. 14th March 1984Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  15. 15th March 1984Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  16. 16th March 1984Which 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 March 1984Explain what happens if a program tries to read index 5 of an array declared with 5 elements.
  18. 18th March 1984An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  19. 19th March 1984A 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 March 1984Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  21. 21st March 1984Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  22. 22nd March 1984State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  23. 23rd March 1984A 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 March 1984Define the term protocol.
  25. 25th March 1984Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  26. 26th March 1984Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  27. 27th March 1984Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  28. 28th March 1984An 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 March 1984Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  30. 30th March 1984Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  31. 31st March 1984Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.