Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

August 1990 5-a-day

Every sheet in August 1990

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

  1. 1st August 1990State the difference between lossy and lossless compression.
  2. 2nd August 1990State the condition that must be met before a binary search can be used on an array.
  3. 3rd August 1990A logic circuit has inputs C and D. C feeds into a NOT gate; the output of the NOT gate and D feed into an OR gate, giving output Y. Write the Boolean expression for Y and state its value when C = 1 and D = 0.
  4. 4th August 1990A pseudocode algorithm is: count <- 0, x <- 10, WHILE x > 0, count <- count + 1, x <- x - 3, ENDWHILE, OUTPUT count. Complete a trace table for x and count, laid out as x | count, then state the value output.
  5. 5th August 1990Which piece of network hardware connects a LAN to another network such as the internet, directing data packets based on IP address?
  6. 6th August 1990Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  7. 7th August 1990Convert the denary number 45 to hexadecimal.
  8. 8th August 1990What does the acronym CPU stand for?
  9. 9th August 1990State what the term malware means.
  10. 10th August 1990A 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.
  11. 11th August 1990An 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).
  12. 12th August 1990Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
  13. 13th August 1990Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
  14. 14th August 1990Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
  15. 15th August 1990State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
  16. 16th August 1990Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
  17. 17th August 1990State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  18. 18th August 1990A password field requires between 6 and 12 characters. State two boundary data values that should be used to test this field.
  19. 19th August 1990A table called books has fields bookId, title, authorId and copiesAvailable. Write an SQL statement that selects the title of every book with more than 2 copies available.
  20. 20th August 1990State one function carried out by the operating system of a computer.
  21. 21st August 1990In computational thinking, what is meant by the term 'decomposition'?
  22. 22nd August 1990Given A = 1 and B = 1, state the value of A AND B.
  23. 23rd August 1990State how many different values can be represented using 5 bits, and explain your reasoning.
  24. 24th August 1990Define a peer-to-peer network.
  25. 25th August 1990Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
  26. 26th August 1990Convert the denary number 5 to a 4-bit binary number.
  27. 27th August 1990A CPU has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Calculate how many clock cycles it completes in 2 seconds.
  28. 28th August 1990A 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.
  29. 29th August 1990Trace this algorithm with data = [4, 9, 2, 9, 7] and state the final output. total = 0; count = 0; for i = 0 to 4: if data[i] > 5 then total = total + data[i] and count = count + 1; next i; print(total, count).
  30. 30th August 1990A mono sound clip has a sample rate of 4000 Hz and lasts 2 seconds. Calculate the total number of samples taken.
  31. 31st August 1990State the type of program that is typically stored in ROM.