Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data

Assessment – Answers

Assessment answers
Task
The partial program below creates a list of the days of the week and assigns it to days.

1 days = ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday",

2 "Thursday", "Friday",
3 "Saturday", "Sunday"]

Question 1: If the lines below were added to the program, what would the program
output be?

4 item = days[3]
5 print(item)

Answer Thursday

Question 2: If the lines below were added to the program, what would the program
output be?

4 index = 1
5 item = days[index+1]
6 print(index, item)

Answer 1 Wednesday

Teacher note: The value of index is also printed to make sure the learners don’t think
that index has not been incremented.

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 Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data
Assessment – Answers

Question 3: Fill in the gaps in the code below, so that the items in the list of days are
displayed on the screen:

4 for day in days :

5 print( day )

Task
Read the program below:

1 planets = ["Mercury", "Venus", "Earth",

2 "Mars", "Jupiter", "Saturn",
3 "Uranus", "Neptune"]
4 index = int(input())
5 planet = planets[index]
6 if index < 3:
7 print("It’s a rocky planet")
8 elif planet[1] in [‘a’, ‘e’]:
9 print("The second letter is", planet[1])

Question 1: If the user types 1 on the keyboard, what will be the output of this program
when it is executed?
Answer It’s a rocky planet

Teacher note: The objective is not to assess knowledge of zero-based indices again. The
answer will be the same regardless of whether the learner thinks that the planet is
Mercury or Venus.
Question 2: If the user types 3 on the keyboard, what will be the output of this
program when it is executed?
Answer The second letter is a

Teacher note: The objective is not to assess knowledge of zero-based indices again. The
answer will be the same regardless of whether the learner thinks that the planet is Earth
or Mars.
Question 3: Suppose that the elif in line 8 is modified to an if. If the user types 1 on the
keyboard, what will be the output of this program when it is executed?

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 Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data
Assessment – Answers

Answer It’s a rocky planet

The second letter is e

Question 4: The ‘rocky planets’ are the first four planets of the solar system. How
would you modify the program so that all planets are correctly classified (i.e. the
message “It’s a rocky planet” is displayed for all four of them).
Answer Change the condition in line 6 to index < 4 or index <= 3.

Task
Read the program below and answer the questions. You can use the reference table at
the bottom of the page to see how the index method works.

1 alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
2 letter = 'c'
3 position = alphabet.index(letter)
4 print(position)

Question: What will be the output of this program?

A. 2
B. 3
C. d Answer A
D. ‘c’ + 1

Question: The program below is an extension of the previous one. Fill in the gaps, so
that the program prompts the user to enter a word and then iterates over each letter in
the word to display its position in the alphabet.

1 alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
2 print("Enter a word:")
3 word = input()
4 for letter in word :
5 position = alphabet.index(letter)
6 print(position)

Reference table

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 Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data
Assessment – Answers

string.index(substring) Search in a string for the first

occurrence of a substring
e.g. word.index("intro") and return its (zero-based)
index.
e.g. name.index("A")

Task
The program below converts a binary number to its decimal equivalent. The questions
that follow do not require you to understand how it works.

1 binary = input()
2 decimal = 0
3 weight = 1
4 for digit in reversed(binary):
5 if digit == '1':
6 decimal = decimal + weight
7 weight = 2 * weight
8 print(binary, "=", decimal)

Question 1: Locate all the variables in the program.

Variables binary, decimal, weight, digit

Question 2: Locate the line of code where program execution is suspended until the
user enters a value on the keyboard.
Line 1 (due to input)

Question 3: Locate the line of code that contains a condition (a logical expression).
Line 5 (the condition is: digit == ‘1’)

Question 4: Locate the line of code that doubles the value of a variable.
Line 7 (the assignment is weight = 2 * weight)

Question 5: Locate the lines of code that may be executed more than once.

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 Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data
Assessment – Answers

Lines 5 to 7 (they are included in a for-loop)

Question 6: Locate the line of code that may never be executed.

Line 6 (it lies within an if, so if the condition is never True, it will never be
executed)

Task
Read the program below and answer the questions. The reference table after the
questions shows you how the append and pop methods work.

1 days = []
2 while len(days) < 12:
3 days.append(31)
4 days.append(30)
5 days[1] = 28
6 days.pop()
7 days.insert(7, 31)

Question 1: What will be the contents of the days list, after lines 1 to 4 of the program
have been executed?
Answer [31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30]

Question 2: What will be the contents of the days list, after line 5 of the program has
been executed?
Write the items of the list, or describe how the list will change with respect to your previous
answer.

Answer [31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30]
The value of the second item becomes 28.

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 Year 9 – Python programming with sequences of data
Assessment – Answers

Question 3: What will be the contents of the days list, after line 6 of the program has
been executed?
Write the items of the list, or describe how the list will change with respect to your previous
answer.

Answer [31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
The last item (30) has been removed from the list.

Question 4: What will be the contents of the days list, after line 7 of the program has
been executed?
Write the items of the list, or describe how the list will change with respect to your previous
answer.

Answer [31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
A new item (31) has been inserted as the 8th item in the list (with index 7).

Teacher note: The objective is to assess understanding of the insert method, not to
assess knowledge of zero-based indices again. The answer will be the same regardless
of whether the learner inserts at position 7 or 8.
Reference table

list.append(item) Add an item to the end of the list

e.g. numbers.append(42)

list.insert(index, item) Insert an item at a given position

e.g. cities.insert(2, "Oslo")

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