Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

September 1986 5-a-day

Every sheet in September 1986

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 1986State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  2. 2nd September 1986Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  3. 3rd September 1986Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
  4. 4th September 1986Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  5. 5th September 1986A 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.
  6. 6th September 1986Each 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.
  7. 7th September 1986Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  8. 8th September 1986State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  9. 9th September 1986Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  10. 10th September 1986Calculate the number of cables needed to connect 8 computers in a full mesh topology, where every computer connects directly to every other computer.
  11. 11th September 1986Give one advantage and one disadvantage of using a compiler.
  12. 12th September 1986Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  13. 13th September 1986Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  14. 14th September 1986Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  15. 15th September 1986Write a loop in pseudocode that outputs every element of a 1D array named names of length 6.
  16. 16th September 1986An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  17. 17th September 1986A 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.
  18. 18th September 1986Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  19. 19th September 1986Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  20. 20th September 1986State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  21. 21st September 1986A 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.
  22. 22nd September 1986A 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?
  23. 23rd September 1986Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  24. 24th September 1986Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  25. 25th September 1986Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  26. 26th September 1986An 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.
  27. 27th September 1986Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  28. 28th September 1986Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  29. 29th September 1986Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  30. 30th September 1986Name the translator used for assembly language and describe how it differs from a compiler.