Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science
December 1998 - GCSE Computer Science 5-a-day
Every GCSE Computer Science sheet published in December 1998, with answers. Systems, data representation, networks, algorithms and programming.
Every sheet in December 1998
The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.
- 1st December 1998Give one advantage of a star topology compared with a mesh topology.
- 2nd December 1998State why a program written in a high level language must be translated.
- 3rd December 1998Add the 8-bit binary numbers 00101101 and 00010011, giving your answer as an 8-bit binary number.
- 4th December 1998State the three stages of the fetch-decode-execute cycle in the order they occur.
- 5th December 1998State one weakness of a simple shift cipher compared to modern encryption methods used on networks.
- 6th December 1998Describe what a nested loop does when it processes a 2D array.
- 7th December 1998Define the term 'pixel'.
- 8th December 1998Order these from fastest access speed to slowest: RAM, cache, registers, secondary storage.
- 9th December 1998Which piece of UK legislation makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer system?
- 10th December 1998Evaluate the expression 23 DIV 4.
- 11th December 1998State the value returned by LENGTH(word) if word stores the string 'Computer'.
- 12th December 1998A 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.
- 13th December 1998Give two reasons why network communication is divided into layers.
- 14th December 1998A 'quantity' field on a website must only accept whole numbers from 1 to 10. Which validation check identifies that 15 has been entered?
- 15th December 1998A 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.
- 16th December 1998A row of 8 pixels is WWWBBBWW. Use run-length encoding to encode this row as pairs of (colour, run length).
- 17th December 1998An 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.
- 18th December 1998Complete: NOT 0 = ?
- 19th December 1998State how many different values can be represented using 5 bits, and explain your reasoning.
- 20th December 1998State what LAN stands for.
- 21st December 1998Explain why an interpreter is often preferred while a program is being written.
- 22nd December 1998An 8-bit register stores the value 01100000 (denary 96). State the resulting 8-bit binary value after a left shift by 1 place, and state whether an overflow occurs.
- 23rd December 1998Which CPU register holds the address of the next instruction to be fetched?
- 24th December 1998Distinguish between the network security threats known as phishing and pharming.
- 25th December 1998A 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.
- 26th December 1998A row of pixels is encoded using run-length encoding as: 3W 4B 3W. State the original row of pixels it represents.
- 27th December 1998A photo file is 3.5 MB in size. Calculate its size in kilobytes (KB). Use 1 MB = 1000 KB.
- 28th December 1998A streaming company records which shows each user watches and uses this to recommend similar shows. Explain one ethical concern this could raise, even if the company only uses the data to improve recommendations.
- 29th December 1998State the most appropriate data type for storing a person's shoe size if only whole sizes (e.g. 7, 8, 9) are allowed.
- 30th December 1998State the key difference between a procedure and a function.
- 31st December 1998Give one example of an optical secondary storage device.