AP CSP Algorithms & Programming (College Board Style)

For which of the following situations would it be best to use a heuristic in order to find a solution that runs in a reasonable amount of time?

• Appending a value to a list of n elements, which requires no list elements be examined.

• Finding the fastest route that visits every location among n locations, which requires n!n! possible routes be examined.

• Performing a binary search for a score in a sorted list of n scores, which requires that fewer than n scores be examined.

• Performing a linear search for a name in an unsorted database of nn people, which requires that up to n entries be examined.

Which of the following is a benefit of using a list as a data abstraction in a program?

• Lists often allow their size to be easily updated to hold as many data values as needed.

• Lists convert all elements to strings so that they can be inspected character-by-character.

• Lists prevent duplicate data values from appearing in the list.

• Lists are used to store all input data so that there is a running record of all user input.

The variable isOpen is to be used to indicate whether or not a store is currently open. Which of the following is the most appropriate data type for isOpen ?

• number

• string

• lsit

• boolean

Assume that both lists and strings are indexed starting with index 1.

The list wordList has the following contents.

["abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl"]

Let myWord be the element at index 3 of wordList. Let myChar be the character at index 2 of myWord. What is the value of myChar ?

• "e"

• "f"

• "h"

• "i"

A time stamp indicates the date and time that a measurement was taken. A data scientist has a list containing 10,000 time stamps, sorted in chronological order. Which of the following is closest to the maximum number of values that will need to be examined when performing a binary search for a value in the list?

• 15

• 10

• 5000

• 10,000

A computer science student completes a program and asks a classmate for feedback. The classmate suggests rewriting some of the code to include more procedural abstraction. Which of the following is NOT a benefit of procedural abstraction?

• Making the code more readable

• Making the code run faster

• Providing more opportunities for code reuse

• Reducing the amount of duplicated code

The list wordList contains a list of 10 string values. Which of the following is a valid index for the list?

• -1

• "hello"

• 1.25

• 4

Suppose that a list of numbers contains values [-4, -1, 1, 5, 2, 10, 10, 15, 30]. Which of the following best explains why a binary search should NOT be used to search for an item in this list?

• The list contains both positive and negative elements.

• The list contains an odd number of elements.

• The elements of the list are not sorted.

• The list contains duplicate elements.

Consider the following code segment.

x ←← 25

y ←← 50

z ←← 75

x ←← y

y ←← z

z ←← x

Which of the variables have the value 50 after executing the code segment?

• x only

• y only

• x and z only

• x, y, and z

A city planner is using simulation software to study crowd flow out of a large arena after an event has ended. The arena is located in an urban city. Which of the following best describes a limitation of using a simulation for this purpose?

• The model used by the simulation software cannot be modified once the simulation has been used.

• The model used by the simulation software often omits details so that it is easier to implement.

• Running a simulation requires more time to generate data from trials than observing the crowd exiting the arena at various events.

• Running a simulation requires a large number of observations to be collected before it can be used to explore a problem.