Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science
February 2012 - GCSE Computer Science 5-a-day
Every GCSE Computer Science sheet published in February 2012, with answers. Systems, data representation, networks, algorithms and programming.
Every sheet in February 2012
The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.
- 1st February 2012Which CPU register holds the address of the next instruction to be fetched?
- 2nd February 2012Distinguish between the network security threats known as phishing and pharming.
- 3rd February 2012A 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.
- 4th February 2012A row of pixels is encoded using run-length encoding as: 3W 4B 3W. State the original row of pixels it represents.
- 5th February 2012A photo file is 3.5 MB in size. Calculate its size in kilobytes (KB). Use 1 MB = 1000 KB.
- 6th February 2012A 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.
- 7th February 2012State the most appropriate data type for storing a person's shoe size if only whole sizes (e.g. 7, 8, 9) are allowed.
- 8th February 2012State the pseudocode operator commonly used to join (concatenate) two strings, then show how it joins 'Rev' and 'ision' to produce 'Revision'.
- 9th February 2012Give one example of an optical secondary storage device.
- 10th February 2012State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
- 11th February 2012State the term used for realistic data that a program would be expected to handle during normal use.
- 12th February 2012Define the term 'primary key' as used in a database table.
- 13th February 2012State the difference between lossy and lossless compression.
- 14th February 2012State the condition that must be met before a binary search can be used on an array.
- 15th February 2012A 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.
- 16th February 2012Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
- 17th February 2012Which piece of network hardware connects a LAN to another network such as the internet, directing data packets based on IP address?
- 18th February 2012Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
- 19th February 2012Convert the denary number 45 to hexadecimal.
- 20th February 2012What does the acronym CPU stand for?
- 21st February 2012State what the term malware means.
- 22nd February 2012Trace 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).
- 23rd February 2012An 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).
- 24th February 2012Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
- 25th February 2012Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
- 26th February 2012Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
- 27th February 2012A 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.
- 28th February 2012Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
- 29th February 2012Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.