Computer Science

Revision Booklet
OCR J277
Paper 1 – Computer Systems: Friday 19th May pm

Paper 2 – Computational thinking, algorithms and

programming: Thursday 25th May pm

Remember: Although topics are in specification as

paper 1 and paper 2 there is some cross over.
Any areas from paper 1 that are not covered, will
be in the paper 2.
Programming, although paper2 content, can appear
in paper 1.

Page 1 of 37
Paper 1 – Computer Systems

Page 2 of 37
1. State the purpose of the CPU. [2]

2. State the name of the component that performs calculations and decisions. [1]

3. The program counter and accumulator are examples of what components of a CPU? [1]

4. Describe the purpose of the cache. [2]

5. State two functions of the control unit in a CPU. [2]

6. Describe the purpose of the memory data register. [2]

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 7. State an example of an embedded system and explain why it is a computer system. [2]

8. Explain the purpose of the program counter, and how its value changes. [2]

9. State three factors that affect the speed of a CPU. [3]

10. A von Neumann machine has a fetch, decode, execute cycle.

Explain what happens at each stage of this cycle. [3]

End of test

Total 20 marks

Page 4 of 37
Page 5 of 37
1. State the purpose of the ROM in a typical desktop computer. [1]

2. Describe the purpose of the RAM. [3]

3. Explain the differences between RAM and ROM. [4]

4. Describe why virtual memory is needed. [2]

5. Explain how virtual memory works. [4]

6. Using a suitable example, explain the need for primary storage. [4]

7. State why a cartridge for a portable entertainment games system could be ROM. [1]

8. State one reason why a portable entertainment games system needs some RAM. [1]

9. State the purpose of secondary storage. [1]

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 10. State four characteristics that should be considered when choosing secondary storage devices for a given
application. [4]

11. A flying hobby drone is to be fitted with a gimbal and camera. State two reasons why solid state storage is a
suitable choice, and one reason why a hard disk would be unsuitable for this application.
[3]

12. State what is meant by the capacity of a device. [1]

13. Put the following devices in order of capacity, lowest to highest: DVD-R, CD-R, Blu-Ray™. [1]

14. Evaluate the merits of a hard disk drive or a solid state drive to use as the secondary storage in a laptop
computer. [6]

15. Given the following assumptions:

File type Approximate size

1 page word processed file with no images 0.1MB

Postcard sized photograph 6MB
3 minute MP3 music file 6MB
1 minute compressed video file 50MB
State the storage requirements for these scenarios in gigabytes: [4]

200 postcard sized photographs

An album of 21 music tracks, 3 minutes each

Twenty 3 minute video files to be streamed over the internet

120 student essays, each three pages each with no images

End of test Total 40 marks
Page 7 of 37
 1. State the capacity in gigabytes of a 2TB portable hard drive. [1]

2. State the denary number 24 in binary. Show your answer in 8 bits. [2]

3. Show how the addition of the denary numbers 30 and 20 is performed in binary. [4]

4. Explain how an overflow occurs when adding two 8 bit binary numbers. [2]

5. Show the result of a 1 bit binary left shift on the number: 00101100 [1]

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6. Convert the denary number 128 to hexadecimal. Show your working. [2]

7. Convert the hexadecimal number 7E to denary. Show your working. [3]

8.
Show the result of a 2 bit binary right shift on the number: 00110100 [1]

9. Convert the binary number 11111101 into hexadecimal and provide its denary equivalent. Show your working.
[3]

10. Braille characters are represented using six dot positions arranged in a rectangle. Each position may contain
either a raised dot or not. This is an example of a 6-bit character set. State how many characters can be stored
in this character set. [1]

End of test

Total 20 marks

Page 9 of 37
1. James is a graphic designer. He has created an icon set of 20 icons for a project. The icons are
uncompressed images of 96x96 pixels in 8-bit colour. Explain how the approximate file size can be
calculated for the icon set. [3]

2. State how many different colours can be stored using 8-bit colour. [1]

3. James has also created a video clip to promote his work which is uploaded to a popular video streaming
service. MP4 compression is used to store the video clip on the hard disk of the server. State what is meant
by the term “compression”. [1]

4. Describe two advantages of the streaming service using compression. [4]

5. State one potential disadvantage to the user of the streaming service using compression.
[1]

6. Explain why an online software distributor cannot use the same type of compression as the video streaming
service. [4]

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 7. When a video clip is created, sound is sampled from a microphone. Describe what is meant by the term,
“sound sampling”. [2]

8. State what is meant by the term, “sampling rate”. [1]

9. Describe the effect of increasing the sampling rate. [2]

10. State what is meant by the term, “bit depth”. [1]

End of test

Total 20 marks

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Page 12 of 37
Page 13 of 37
1. Identify the two networks shown. [2]

2. Using the names of the networks identified, complete the table below. [2]
Description Type of network

Is easier to set up and maintain.

Is more resistant to a hardware fault.

3. State another form of common wireless technology other than Wi-Fi. [1]

4. It is discovered that the connection to the router for one of the devices on the wireless network is
unreliable. Other than a hardware fault, state two possible causes for this. [2]

5. State what is meant by the term encryption. [1]

6. Explain what is meant by the term Ethernet. [2]

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 7. Describe the purpose of the protocols: POP, IMAP, and SMTP. [3]

8. State what is meant by the term ‘layering protocols’. [1]

9. State two advantages of wired networks and two advantages of wireless networks. [4]

10. State the relationship between servers and clients, provide an example. [2]

End of test Total 20 marks

1. Describe a local area network [2]

2. Describe one advantage and one disadvantages of a local area network over stand-alone computers.
[2]

3. State two factors affect the performance of a network [2]

Page 15 of 37
 4. Describe what is meant by a client-server model for a local area network. [3]

5. Describe what is meant by a peer-to-peer model of networking. [3]

6. State one disadvantage of a peer-to-peer model of networking. [1]

7. Describe one difference between a switch and a router. [1]

8. State one advantage of using fibre optic cable instead of twisted copper cable. [1]

9. Describe what is meant by “the cloud” [2]

10. Explain how the URL: www.bbc.co.uk gets resolved to an IP address. [2]

11. What type of address is being shown here 192.168.0.1 [1]

End of test

Total 20 marks

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Page 17 of 37
1. State a type of malware. [1]

2. Describe what is meant by the term ‘phishing’. [2]

3. Describe what is meant by the term ‘SQL injection’. [2]

4. People are often regarded as the ‘weak point’ in secure systems. Explain what is meant by this term.
[8]

5. John has had a message pop-up on his computer asking him to pay $800 to have his files decrypted. He has
looked at his file store, and his filenames have been changed. State two ways this could have happened.
[2]

6. Describe how could John have protected himself against this attack. [2]

Page 18 of 37
 7. Explain what is meant by the term ‘denial of service attack’. [2]

8. State what is meant by the term, ‘penetration testing’. [1]

Q9. Parveen's computer experiences a brute force attack. Fortunately, it failed because she had a strong password.
(a) Briefly explain how a brute force attack is carried out. [2]

(b) Describe what is meant by a strong password. [4]

Q10. Jack is sent an email, offering him the latest iPhone for £99. They tell him it is a special offer because they have
some bankrupt stock. You suspect that this is a phishing attack. Describe what a phishing attack is and explain the
advice that you would give to Jack. [4]

Q11 Peter will also install a Virtual Private Network (VPN) onto his home computer, as well as on all of his other
devices, including his phone and tablet. His job frequently takes him abroad. Explain why installing a VPN onto all of
his devices is a good idea. [5]

End of test Total 35 marks

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Page 20 of 37
1. State the purpose of operating system software. [1]

2. State one type of user interface. [1]

3. Describe two of the features of this user interface. [2]

4. Explain what is meant by the term, ‘multi-tasking’. [2]

5.
6. State one advantage to the user of multi-tasking. [1]

7. Explain two ways in which an operating system manages the memory of a computer. [2]

8. State the purpose of a device driver. [1]

9. Explain what is meant by a ‘multi-user’ operating system. [2]

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 10. Excluding backing up and compressing files, state four common file management actions an operating
system facilitates. [4]

11. State two types of utility system software. [2]

12. State two reasons for compressing video files for sharing on The Internet. [2]

End of test

Total 20 marks

Page 22 of 37
Page 23 of 37
 1. State three principles of the Data Protection Act 2018. [3]

2. State what is made illegal under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. [1]

3. State the definition of the term “Data Subject” under the Data Protection Act 2018. [1]

4. State two reasons why a country might decide to restrict access to the Internet for its citizens.
[2]

5. Describe three environmental issues with the manufacturing, use and disposal of computer technology.
[3]

6. State two differences between open source and proprietary software. [2]

7. A supermarket is reducing the number of checkout operators in favour of self-service checkout terminals.
Explain the impact for the customer, company and workers? [8]

End of test Total 20 marks

Page 24 of 37
Paper 2 – Computational thinking, algorithms
and programming

Page 25 of 37
1. State what is meant by the term, “abstraction”. [1]

2. State what is meant by the term, “problem decomposition”. [1]

3. State two advantages of problem decomposition. [2]

4. State the name of the algorithm shown. [1]

x = [2,4,6,8,10]
f = False
n = 0
while f == False AND n < x.length
if x[n] == 8 then
f = True
endif
n = n + 1
endwhile

5. State a precondition for a binary search. [1]

Page 26 of 37
 6. Label each of the flow diagram symbols below in the middle of the symbol. [3]

7. Illustrate the first three steps of a bubble sort on the numbers: 5, 10, 7, 8 [3]

8. Illustrate the steps of a merge sort on the numbers: 8, 3, 9, 2 [4]

9. The following algorithm should output the t times table in the format:
1x8=8
2 x 8 = 16
3 x 8 = 24
… (up to 12x)

Correct errors in the pseudocode and complete the output statement. [4]
t = int(input(“Enter the times table you want to output:”))
for x = 1 to 12
p = t * t
output statement using p needed here
next x

print( )

End of test

Total 20 marks

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Page 28 of 37
 1. Describe what is meant by the term, “constant”. [2]

2. State what is meant by the term, “casting” and give an example. [2]

3. State the three programming constructs. [3]

4. The following program assigns the variable y to “MP”.

x = "COMPUTER SCIENCE"
y = x.subtring(2,2)

Write a line of code to extract and output “ENC” from the string x. [2]

Page 29 of 37
 5. State one similarity and one difference between a function and a procedure. [2]

6. Jane has been learning to program for some time, but never uses procedures in her code.
State two reasons why she would be advised to do this. [2]

7. An online order form requires the user to enter data into a form. Complete the table. [4]
Variable Purpose Data Type
name
Quantity Holds the number of items to be ordered.
Telephone Holds the telephone number of the customer.
Price Holds the price of the item.
Updates Indicates whether the customer is to receive marketing
emails in the future.

8. A set of records is held in a database table called ‘customers’ as shown below. Write a SQL command to
return only the surname of customers with reward points over 1000. [3]
card_no surname reward_points
00056432 Baker 3455
00023198 Evans 876
00098255 Smith 8775

End of test

Total 20 marks

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Page 31 of 37
1. Describe three ways in which a programmer can make their code maintainable. [3]

2. Explain what is meant by the term, “iterative testing”. [3]

3. The following program does not work. State the logic error. [1]

total = 32
tests = 0
average = total/tests

4. Explain the term, “syntax error”. [2]

5. State what is meant by the term, “input validation”. [1]

6. The following program does not work. Explain the error in this program and state whether it is a syntax or
logic error. [2]

number1 = input("Enter number 1:")

number2 = input("Enter number 2:")
if number1 < number2 then
print("The largest number is",number1)
else
print("The largest number is",number2)
endif

Page 32 of 37
 7. An online order form accepts a quantity between 1 and 10 for a product. Suggest suitable test data for this
program and state why the test is necessary. [6]

Test data Reason

8. Explain what is meant by the term, “length check” and give an example. [2]

9. A car dealership uses a computer system to record details of the cars that it has for sale. Each car has a
make, model, age and number of miles driven.

i. The car dealership only sells cars that have fewer than 10 000 miles and are 5 years old or less.
Write an algorithm that will:
 ask the user to enter the number of miles and the age of a car
 validate the input to check that only sensible values that are in the given range are entered
 output True if valid data has been entered or False if invalid data has been entered.
[5]

ii. The validation routine from part (i) must be tested with normal, erroneous and boundary test data.
Identify suitable test data for each type of test.
[3]

Miles Age

Normal

Erroneous

Boundary

End of test Total 28 marks

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1. Label each of these logic gates and then complete its truth table below. [6]

A A
C C A B
B B

2. Draw the logic diagram for the expression: NOT Y OR Z [2]

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 4. Complete the truth table for the logic diagram below: [8]

X T U W X Y Z
T

Z
U Y
W

5. Complete the boxes on the diagram with a 0 or 1 to show the state of the four outputs: [4]

1
0

End of test Total 20 marks

Page 35 of 37
1. A programmer uses a high level language to produce code for an interpreter.
State the name of the code they are producing. [1]

2. State two reasons why the programmer would choose to write their code in a high-level language.
[2]

3. State the purpose of a translator. [2]

4. State two features of an interpreter and explain why this is advantageous to the programmer.
[4]

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 5. The interpreter produces machine code. Describe is meant by the term,
“machine code”? [2]

6. State the relationship between a mnemonic in a low-level language and a machine code instruction.
[1]

7. Label the three types of code illustrated. [3]

1001 0001 INP result = input(“Enter the result”)

0001 0110 ADD 6 result = result + 1
0011 0111 STA 7

8. State three features of an integrated development environment. [3]

9. Describe two advantages of using a compiler instead of an interpreter. [2]

End of test

Total 20 marks

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