Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

December 1990 5-a-day

Every sheet in December 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 December 1990State what the term malware means.
  2. 2nd December 1990Describe what a nested loop does when it processes a 2D array.
  3. 3rd December 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).
  4. 4th December 1990Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
  5. 5th December 1990Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
  6. 6th December 1990Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
  7. 7th December 1990A 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.
  8. 8th December 1990Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
  9. 9th December 1990Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
  10. 10th December 1990A password field requires between 6 and 12 characters. State two boundary data values that should be used to test this field.
  11. 11th December 1990A 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;
  12. 12th December 1990State one function carried out by the operating system of a computer.
  13. 13th December 1990In computational thinking, what is meant by the term 'decomposition'?
  14. 14th December 1990Given A = 1 and B = 1, state the value of A AND B.
  15. 15th December 1990Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  16. 16th December 1990Define a peer-to-peer network.
  17. 17th December 1990Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  18. 18th December 1990Convert the denary number 5 to a 4-bit binary number.
  19. 19th December 1990A CPU has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Calculate how many clock cycles it completes in 2 seconds.
  20. 20th December 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.
  21. 21st December 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.
  22. 22nd December 1990A mono sound clip has a sample rate of 4000 Hz and lasts 2 seconds. Calculate the total number of samples taken.
  23. 23rd December 1990State the type of program that is typically stored in ROM.
  24. 24th December 1990State one reason a small business might choose to use open source software instead of proprietary (closed source) software.
  25. 25th December 1990A FOR loop runs: total = 0, FOR i = 1 TO 4, total = total + i, NEXT i. State the value of total after the loop finishes.
  26. 26th December 1990Write 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.
  27. 27th December 1990State the typical maximum capacity of a single-layer DVD.
  28. 28th December 1990State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  29. 29th December 1990State what is meant by a syntax error.
  30. 30th December 1990State what a foreign key is used for.
  31. 31st December 1990What type of utility software reorganises files on a hard disk so fragmented parts are stored closer together?