Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

November 1989 5-a-day

Every sheet in November 1989

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

  1. 1st November 1989Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  2. 2nd November 1989Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  3. 3rd November 1989State the key difference between a procedure and a function.
  4. 4th November 1989A 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.
  5. 5th November 1989Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
  6. 6th November 1989Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  7. 7th November 1989Give one advantage of a relational database over a flat-file database.
  8. 8th November 1989Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  9. 9th November 1989An 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.
  10. 10th November 1989Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  11. 11th November 1989Convert the hexadecimal number 3F to denary.
  12. 12th November 1989Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  13. 13th November 1989Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  14. 14th November 1989Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  15. 15th November 1989State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  16. 16th November 1989State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  17. 17th November 1989A 2D array grid is declared as grid[4][6]. State how many rows and columns it has and how many elements it holds in total.
  18. 18th November 1989Define the term 'pixel'.
  19. 19th November 1989Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  20. 20th November 1989Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  21. 21st November 1989Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  22. 22nd November 1989A programmer wants any syntax error in their program to be reported before the program starts running at all. State whether a compiler or an interpreter behaves this way, and explain why.
  23. 23rd November 1989A 1 TB hard disk drive costs 40 pounds. A 500 GB solid-state drive costs 60 pounds. Calculate the cost per gigabyte of each device, and state which is cheaper per GB. Use 1 TB = 1000 GB.
  24. 24th November 1989State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  25. 25th November 1989A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
  26. 26th November 1989A table called bookings has fields bookingId, customerName and eventDate. Write an SQL statement that deletes the booking with bookingId 45.
  27. 27th November 1989A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
  28. 28th November 1989An array contains [9, 2, 6], to be sorted using insertion sort. Show the state of the array after each new element has been inserted into its correct position.
  29. 29th November 1989Complete: NOT 0 = ?
  30. 30th November 1989Convert the denary number 39 to an 8-bit binary number, showing your working.