Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

March 1987 5-a-day

Every sheet in March 1987

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 1987Explain the purpose of a breakpoint.
  2. 2nd March 1987Convert the denary number 45 to hexadecimal.
  3. 3rd March 1987What does the acronym CPU stand for?
  4. 4th March 1987State what the term malware means.
  5. 5th March 1987Explain why a running maximum should be initialised to the first element of the array rather than to 0.
  6. 6th March 1987An uncompressed file is 6000 KB. After lossless compression it is 1500 KB. Calculate the compression ratio in the form n:1 (original size : compressed size).
  7. 7th March 1987Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
  8. 8th March 1987Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
  9. 9th March 1987Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
  10. 10th March 1987A function is defined as: FUNCTION addTax(price) RETURN price x 1.2 ENDFUNCTION. Another line of code runs: total <- addTax(20) + addTax(30). Trace both function calls and state the final value of total.
  11. 11th March 1987Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
  12. 12th March 1987Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  13. 13th March 1987A password field requires between 6 and 12 characters. State two boundary data values that should be used to test this field.
  14. 14th March 1987A table called staff has fields staffId, name, department and salary, storing these records: staffId | name | department | salary, 1 | Ben | Sales | 24000, 2 | Chloe | IT | 31000, 3 | Dan | Sales | 27000. State which staffId(s) would be returned by: SELECT staffId FROM staff WHERE department = 'Sales' AND salary > 25000;
  15. 15th March 1987State one function carried out by the operating system of a computer.
  16. 16th March 1987In computational thinking, what is meant by the term 'decomposition'?
  17. 17th March 1987Given A = 1 and B = 1, state the value of A AND B.
  18. 18th March 1987Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  19. 19th March 1987Define a peer-to-peer network.
  20. 20th March 1987A program compiles and runs but always outputs an average that is too small. State the type of error and explain why the translator did not report it.
  21. 21st March 1987Convert the denary number 5 to a 4-bit binary number.
  22. 22nd March 1987A CPU has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Calculate how many clock cycles it completes in 2 seconds.
  23. 23rd March 1987A simple cipher shifts every letter 2 places forward in the alphabet, wrapping around so Y becomes A and Z becomes B. Encrypt the plaintext CAT using this cipher.
  24. 24th March 1987An array named temps holds 12 values. State the index of the first item and the index of the last item.
  25. 25th March 1987A mono sound clip has a sample rate of 4000 Hz and lasts 2 seconds. Calculate the total number of samples taken.
  26. 26th March 1987State the type of program that is typically stored in ROM.
  27. 27th March 1987State one reason a small business might choose to use open source software instead of proprietary (closed source) software.
  28. 28th March 1987A FOR loop runs: total = 0, FOR i = 1 TO 4, total = total + i, NEXT i. State the value of total after the loop finishes.
  29. 29th March 1987Write 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.
  30. 30th March 1987State the typical maximum capacity of a single-layer DVD.
  31. 31st March 1987State the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, and give one situation where HTTPS is essential.