Exploring Computer Science

Which of the following decimal (base-10) values is equivalent to the binary (base-2) value 101001?

• 22
• 37
• 41
• 82

A city engineer is tasked with studying vehicular traffic patterns throughout a large metropolitan area. He designs a number of small, remote devices that can be installed along streets throughout the city to sense and record the hundreds of cars that pass through each of the city's five busiest intersections during a 24-hour period. Every time a car trips the sensor in a device, it increments an internal, 5-bit counter that stores the number of cars that have passed through the intersection since the counter was last reset. Every 24 hours, each device transmits the 5-bit value stored in its counter back to a central server that collects the daily data from all of the devices throughout the city. After transmitting, the counter in each device is reset back to 0.Fortunately, the engineer's supervisor points out a flaw in the device's design and orders that the engineer modify the design specifications for his device before building and installing all of the sensors. Which of the following is the most likely design flaw in this scenario?

• In order to measure the five busiest intersections, devices will need to be installed at all other intersections throughout the city as well.
• The counter is not capable of counting hundreds of cars without exceeding the limit of the five bits of storage.
• The device should only transmit its counter value once per week to avoid overloading the network.
• In addition to incrementing the counter, the device should also transmit its counter value after each car trips the sensor

Which of the following statements about 32-bit binary values is NOT true?

• Whole numbers within a given range can be expressed by a 32-bit integer representation.
• Real numbers within a given range can be expressed by a 32-bit integer representation.
• Whole numbers within a given range can be expressed by a 32-bit floating-point representation.
• Real numbers within a given range can be expressed by a 32-bit floating-point representation.

A digital file contains the following binary sequence of 24 bits:
010000110110000101110100
Which of the following types of data might the above sequence represent?

• A 24-bit integer value (e.g., 4,153,716)
• A 24-bit RGB color value (e.g., sage green)
• Three ASCII characters (e.g., "Cat")
• All of the above

The owner of a pet store wants to determine how many fish she can keep in a given aquarium before the fish become too overcrowded to survive. Rather than risking the lives of actual fish, she decides to simulate an aquarium with a program in order to determine the maximum capacity of the aquarium. Which of the following would NOT be a useful factor to include when modeling the properties of the simulated tank and fish?

• The color of the fish
• The size of the tank
• The size of the fish
• The amount of food in the tank

When digitizing a recording of a musical performance, which of the following strategies will result in a more accurate digital representation of the original music?

• Increase the volume of the music being digitized
• Increase the frequency of sound samples recorded per second
• Decrease the volume of the music being digitized
• Decrease the frequency of sound samples recorded per second

For her 4^th of July weather report, a local meteorologist wishes to predict the likelihood of whether the scheduled fireworks show might be rained out by analyzing the most recent weather trends in the local vicinity. Which of the following sources of data would be the most appropriate for helping her make her prediction?

• A floating-point value representing the daily rainfall total for July 4^th of the previous year
• A floating-point value representing the highest daily rainfall total over the last 365 days
• A list of integers representing the previous years in which it has rained in the area on the 4th of July
• A list of floating-point values representing the daily rainfall totals for the previous 10 days (June 24^th through July 3^rd)

Which of the following code segments will display "Yes" if and only if your friend's name is Grace and her favorite food is either pizza or popcorn?
Which 2 solutions are correct?

• A + B
• C + D
• A + C
• B + D

ASCII is a character-encoding scheme that uses a numeric value to represent each character. For example, the uppercase letter “G” is represented by the decimal (base 10) value 71. A partial list of characters and their corresponding ASCII values are shown in this table. ASCII characters can also be represented by binary numbers. According to ASCII character encoding, which of the following letters is represented by the binary (base 2) number 1010100?

• N
• P
• T
• W