Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

January 1992 5-a-day

Every sheet in January 1992

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

  1. 1st January 1992State why a program written in a high level language must be translated.
  2. 2nd January 1992Convert the hexadecimal number 1A to denary.
  3. 3rd January 1992Convert the denary number 156 to an 8 bit binary number.
  4. 4th January 1992Which type of malware can replicate itself and spread across a network without attaching to another program or needing a user to run it?
  5. 5th January 1992Describe what a nested loop does when it processes a 2D array.
  6. 6th January 1992An image uses a colour depth of 2 bits per pixel. Calculate the maximum number of different colours it can represent.
  7. 7th January 1992A 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.
  8. 8th January 1992Describe two negative consequences of throwing away old computer hardware instead of recycling it.
  9. 9th January 1992Write a function called isEven that takes one integer parameter, num, and returns True if num is even and False otherwise.
  10. 10th January 1992Give one specific way this code could be refined without changing what it does: a = 5, b = 3, c = a + b, PRINT c
  11. 11th January 1992A 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.
  12. 12th January 1992Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
  13. 13th January 1992Explain why iterative testing, carried out throughout development, tends to make errors cheaper to fix than relying only on final testing.
  14. 14th January 1992A table called members has fields memberId, firstName, lastName and joinYear. Write an SQL statement that adds a new record with memberId 12, firstName 'Priya', lastName 'Shah' and joinYear 2026.
  15. 15th January 1992Define the term 'interrupt' as used to describe a signal received by a CPU.
  16. 16th January 1992An 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.
  17. 17th January 1992Evaluate X = NOT A AND B when A = 0 and B = 1.
  18. 18th January 1992Convert the hexadecimal number FF to an 8-bit binary number.
  19. 19th January 1992Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
  20. 20th January 1992Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
  21. 21st January 1992Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
  22. 22nd January 1992State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
  23. 23rd January 1992State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
  24. 24th January 1992A 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.
  25. 25th January 1992Define the term 'pixel'.
  26. 26th January 1992Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
  27. 27th January 1992Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
  28. 28th January 1992Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
  29. 29th January 1992State the correct order of the three operations used to read data from a text file.
  30. 30th January 1992A 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.
  31. 31st January 1992State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.