Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1987 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 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 December 1987State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  2. 2nd December 1987Order these units of data from smallest to largest: megabyte, byte, gigabyte, kilobyte.
  3. 3rd December 1987Name the four layers of the TCP/IP model in order from the one closest to the user.
  4. 4th December 1987Give one example of erroneous test data for a field that only accepts whole numbers from 1 to 10.
  5. 5th December 1987A 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 December 1987Each 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 December 1987Which flowchart symbol shape is used to represent a decision point (e.g. a yes/no branch)?
  8. 8th December 1987State the two values a Boolean data type can hold.
  9. 9th December 1987Convert the denary number 200 to hexadecimal, showing your working.
  10. 10th December 1987Calculate 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 December 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.
  12. 12th December 1987Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  13. 13th December 1987Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  14. 14th December 1987Which 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 December 1987An array named temps holds 12 values. State the index of the first item and the index of the last item.
  16. 16th December 1987An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  17. 17th December 1987A 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 December 1987Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  19. 19th December 1987Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  20. 20th December 1987State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
  21. 21st December 1987A 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 December 1987State the difference between HTTP and HTTPS, and give one situation where HTTPS is essential.
  23. 23rd December 1987Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  24. 24th December 1987Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
  25. 25th December 1987Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  26. 26th December 1987An 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 December 1987Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  28. 28th December 1987Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  29. 29th December 1987Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  30. 30th December 1987State why a program written in a high level language must be translated.
  31. 31st December 1987Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.