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INTERNATIONAL GCSE
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Paper 2 Concepts and principles of computer science

Wednesday 31 May 2023 07:00 GMT Time allowed: 2 hours

Materials
You will need no other materials. For Examiner’s Use

Question Mark
Instructions
1
• Use black ink or black ball-point pen.
• Fill in the boxes at the top of the page. 2
• Answer all questions. 3
• You must answer the questions in the spaces provided. Do not write 4
outside the box around each page or on blank pages.
• If you need extra space for your answer(s), use the lined pages at the end of 5
this book. Write the question number against your answer(s). 6
• Do all rough work in this booklet. Cross through any work you do not 7
want to be marked.
8

Information 9
• The marks for questions are shown in brackets. 10
• The maximum mark for this paper is 80. 11
12
13
14

TOTAL

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Answer all questions in the spaces provided. box

0 1 . 1 Convert the binary number 01101001 into a decimal number.

[1 mark]

0 1 . 2 Convert the hexadecimal number 7B into an 8-bit binary number.

[1 mark]

0 1 . 3 Add together the two binary numbers in Figure 1.

State your answer in binary.

[2 marks]
Figure 1

0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1

+ 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0

Answer

0 1 . 4 Describe the shift operation needed to divide the binary representation of the decimal
number 40 by 8
[1 mark]

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0 2 . 1 Explain what an algorithm is. box

[2 marks]

0 2 . 2 Explain what decomposition is.

[2 marks]

0 2 . 3 Explain what abstraction is.

[1 mark]

Turn over for the next question

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0 3 . 1 Tick all the statements that are valid reasons for compressing data. box

[2 marks]

A Data will be harder for hackers to read.

B Data will be usable on more machines.

C Data will take less time to transmit across a network.

D Data will use less storage space.

E Only the most important data will be kept.

0 3 . 2 A piece of text represented using ASCII has been compressed using run length
encoding (RLE) as 3b4a3b

In the compressed version of the text each character is represented using ASCII and
the length of each run (the number of times the character appears consecutively) has
been represented using 7 bits.

How many fewer bits are used to represent the text compressed using RLE than for
the uncompressed ASCII version of the text?

Show your working.

[2 marks]

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0 3 . 3 The text TWOTOOTWO is going to be compressed using Huffman coding. To do this a box

Huffman tree can be created.

Table 1 shows the frequencies for each character in the text.

Table 1

Character Frequency
T 3
W 2
O 4

Create a Huffman tree using the information given in Table 1.

Your completed tree does not need to show any information about the frequencies of
the characters.
[3 marks]

Turn over for the next question

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0 4 . 1 Describe the differences between a Local Area Network (LAN) and a Wide Area box

Network (WAN).
[3 marks]

Bus and star are two different LAN topologies.

0 4 . 2 Draw a diagram of a bus topology network with four computers.

[2 marks]

0 4 . 3 State two advantages of using a star topology compared to a bus topology.

[2 marks]

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0 4 . 4 State one advantage of using a bus topology instead of a star topology. box

[1 mark]

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0 5 Pharming and phishing are two social engineering techniques. box

0 5 . 1 Explain what pharming is.

[2 marks]

0 5 . 2 Describe two ways a business could minimise the risks from phishing.
[2 marks]

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0 6 Describe why the following are threats to cyber security. box

[4 marks]

Misconfigured access rights

Outdated software

Turn over for the next question

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0 7 A relational database has been created to store data about films. There are three box

tables in the database Actor, Film and Role.

Figure 2 shows some of the records from the Actor and Film tables. Dates are
shown in the format dd/mm/yyyy.

Figure 2

Actor

ActorID Forename Surname DateOfBirth Gender

1 Paul Campos 07/11/1991 M

2 Bill Atkins 14/07/1992 M

3 Al Bechdel 09/10/1958 M

4 Patty Scaccia 30/01/1996 F

Film

FilmID FilmName Length Rating

1 All of a Sudden 84 3.5

2 This Thunder 105 4.1

3 Ding a Ding Dang 94 3.8

4 In Love with the World 121 2.5

0 7 . 1 The primary key of the Film table is FilmID.

What is a primary key?

[1 mark]

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0 7 . 2 There is no relationship between the Actor and Film tables because there is no box

foreign key.

What is a foreign key?

[2 marks]

0 7 . 3 Describe the two errors that have been made in the following SQL command that
is meant to add a new record to the Actor table.

Your description should make it clear how each error could be fixed.

ADD INTO Actor

VALUES (5, "Yvonne", "Jourgensen", 19/09/2007, "F")
[2 marks]

Question 7 continues on the next page

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0 7 . 4 Complete the following SQL query so that it finds the name and length of all the box

films that have a rating of more than 3 and a length of less than 100.
[4 marks]

SELECT

FROM

WHERE

AND

0 7 . 5 The table design for Actor is:

Actor(ActorID, Forename, Surname, DateOfBirth, Gender)

The table design for Film is:

Film(FilmID, FilmName, Length, Rating)

The Role table has a primary key RoleID. Each record in the Role table is about an
actor in a specific film. Information about how many award nominations and how
many award wins that actor received for that film is also stored in the Role table.

Write the table design for the Role table.

[3 marks]

12

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0 8 . 1 The ASCII code of the character for the digit '0' is 48 in decimal. box

What is the ASCII code of the character '4' in binary?

[1 mark]

0 8 . 2 State two advantages of Unicode compared to ASCII.

[2 marks]

Advantage 1

Advantage 2

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0 9 . 1 A hard disk is an example of magnetic storage. box

Describe how data is represented on a hard disk and how this data is read by the
drive.
[4 marks]

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0 9 . 2 New computers are often fitted with a solid-state drive (SSD) instead of a magnetic box

hard disk drive.

Explain two advantages of using a solid-state drive instead of a magnetic hard disk
drive.
[2 marks]

Advantage 1

Advantage 2

Turn over for the next question

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1 0 Figure 3 shows a web page displayed in a web browser window. box

The web page has been written in HTML only. No CSS has been used.

Figure 3

Components

Components of a computer
The main components are:

1. Processor
2. Main Memory
3. Secondary Storage

More information

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1 0 . 1 The HTML code used to produce the web page in Figure 3 is shown below. Some box

code has been missed out.

Fill in the gaps to complete the HTML code.

[5 marks]

<html>
<head>
<title>Components</title>
</head>
<body>
< >Components of a computer< >
<p>The main < >components< > are:</p>
< >
<li>Processor</li>
<li>Main Memory</li>
<li>Secondary Storage</li>
< >
<p>< = "more.html">More information</a></p>
< >
</html>

1 0 . 2 The CSS code in Figure 4 is applied to the web page in Figure 3.

Figure 4

body { color: blue; }

li { font-style: italic; }

Describe how the appearance of the web page in Figure 3 will change when the CSS
code in Figure 4 is applied to it.
[2 marks]

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1 1 . 1 Define the term software. box

[1 mark]

1 1 . 2 Define the term hardware.

[1 mark]

1 1 . 3 State one difference between RAM and ROM.

[1 mark]

1 1 . 4 Many computer systems use the von Neumann architecture.

Tick one box to indicate which statement is true about every computer that uses the
von Neumann architecture.
[1 mark]

A The computer has two arithmetic logic units (ALUs).

B The computer uses a solid-state drive for secondary storage.

C The computer’s processor has more than one core.

The main memory of the computer stores both programs and

D
data.

E The program that manages the computer is stored in ROM. 4

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1 2 . 1 The truth table in Figure 5 represents the operation of a single logic gate. box

Figure 5

Inputs Output
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1

What is the name of the logic gate this truth table represents?
[1 mark]

1 2 . 2 A Boolean expression can be used to represent the operation of a logic circuit.

In the space below draw a diagram of the logic circuit that is represented by the
Boolean expression:

� + (B ∙ C)
Q=A
[3 marks]

B Q

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1 3 . 1 Explain what the term colour depth means when referring to a bitmap image. box

[1 mark]

1 3 . 2 A bitmap image is 1000 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall. 57 different colours have been
used in the image.

Calculate the minimum file size that could be used to store the image as a bitmap.

Give your answer in kilobytes.

Show your working.

[3 marks]

Working

4
Answer kilobytes

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ANSWER IN THE SPACES PROVIDED

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1 4 Figure 6 shows an algorithm written in pseudocode. box

• The LEN function returns the number of characters in a string. For example,
LEN("TOAST") would return the value 5
• The DIV function performs integer division. For example, 7 DIV 3 is equal to 2
as 3 goes into 7 twice, leaving a reminder of 1

Figure 6

text  USERINPUT
last  LEN(text) - 1
loopend  last DIV 2
result  true
FOR x  0 TO loopend
y  last - x
IF text[x] ≠ text[y] THEN
result  false
ENDIF
ENDFOR
OUTPUT result

1 4 . 1 Complete the trace table below to show how the values on the variables change when
the algorithm is carried out on the input value STARTS.

You may not need to write in all rows of the table.

[5 marks]

text last loopend result x y

STARTS

1 4 . 2 How many different output values can the algorithm produce?

[1 mark]

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1 4 . 3 State an example of an input to the algorithm that would produce true as the output box

[1 mark]
7

END OF QUESTIONS

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Question Additional page, if required.
number Write the question numbers in the left-hand margin.

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Question Additional page, if required.
number Write the question numbers in the left-hand margin.

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Question Additional page, if required.
number Write the question numbers in the left-hand margin.

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