2024 AP DAILY: PRACTICE SESSIONS
AP Computer Science Principles
Session 3 – MCQ
1. Which of the following can be represented by a single binary digit?
Select two answers.
A. The position of the minute hand of a clock
B. The remainder when dividing a whole number by 2
C. The value of a Boolean variable
D. The volume of a car radio
2. An online store uses 6-bit binary sequences to identify each unique item for sale. The store plans to
increase the number of items it sells and is considering using 7-bit binary sequences. Which of the
following best describes the result of using 7-bit sequences instead of 6-bit sequences?
A. 2 more items can be uniquely identified.
B. 10 more items can be uniquely identified.
C. 2 times as many items can be uniquely identified.
D. 10 times as many items can be uniquely identified.
3. Each student that enrolls at a school is assigned a unique ID number, which is stored as a binary
number. The ID numbers increase sequentially by 1 with each newly enrolled student. If the ID
number assigned to the last student who enrolled was the binary number 1001 0011, what binary
number will be assigned to the next student who enrolls?
A. 1001 0100
B. 1001 0111
C. 1101 0100
D. 1101 0111
Source: AP Course and Exam Description; Taken from: APClassroom 1
4. A cable television company stores information about movie purchases made by subscribers. Each day,
the following information is summarized and stored in a publicly available database.
The day and date each movie was purchased
The title of each movie purchased
The cities where subscribers purchased each movie
The number of times each movie was purchased by subscribers in a given city
A sample portion of the database is shown below. The database is sorted by date and movie title.
Which of the following CANNOT be determined using only the information in the database?
A. The date when a certain movie was purchased the greatest number of times
B. The number of movies purchased by an individual subscriber for a particular month
C. The total number of cities in which a certain movie was purchased
D. The total number of movies purchased in a certain city during a particular month
5. When a cellular telephone user places a call, the carrier transmits the caller’s voice as well as
the voice of the person who is called. The encoded voices are the data of the call. In addition to
transmitting the data, the carrier also stores metadata. The metadata of the call include information
such as the time the call is placed and the phone numbers of both participants. For which of the
following goals would it be more useful to computationally analyze the metadata instead of the data?
I. To determine if a caller frequently uses a specific word
II. To estimate the number of phone calls that will be placed next Monday between 10:30 A.M. and
noon.
III. To generate a list of criminal suspects when given the telephone number of a known criminal
A. I only
B. II only
C. II and III only
D. I, II, and III
Source: AP Course and Exam Description; Taken from: APClassroom 2
6. Computers are often used to search through large sets of data to find useful patterns in the data. Which
of the following tasks is NOT an example where searching for patterns is needed to produce useful
information?
A. A credit card company analyzing credit card purchases to identify potential fraudulent charges
B. A grocery store analyzing customers’ past purchases to suggest new products the customer may be
interested in
C. A high school analyzing student grades to identify the students with the top ten highest grade
point averages
D. An online retailer analyzing customers’ viewing habits to suggest other products based on the
purchasing history of other customers
7. The table below shows the time a computer system takes to complete a specified task on the customer
data of different-sized companies.
Based on the information in the table, which of the following tasks is likely to take the longest amount
of time when scaled up for a very large company of approximately 100,000 customers?
A. Backing up data
B. Deleting entries from data
C. Searching through data
D. Sorting data
8. A student is recording a song on her computer. When the recording is finished, she saves a copy on
her computer. The student notices that the saved copy is of lower sound quality than the original
recording. Which of the following could be a possible explanation for the difference in sound quality?
A. The song was saved using fewer bits per second than the original song.
B. The song was saved using more bits per second than the original song.
C. The song was saved using a lossless compression technique.
D. Some information is lost every time a file is saved from one location on a computer to another
location.
Source: AP Course and Exam Description; Taken from: APClassroom 3
9. Two lists, list1 and list2, contain the names of books found in two different collections. A librarian
wants to create newList, which will contain the names of all books found in either list, in alphabetical
order, with duplicate entries removed.
For example, if list1 contains [“Macbeth”, “Frankenstein”, “Jane Eyre”]
and list2 contains [“Frankenstein”, “Dracula”, “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”],
then newList will contain
[“Dracula”, “Frankenstein”, “Hamlet”, “Jane Eyre”, “Macbeth”].
The following procedures are available to create newList.
Which of the following code segments will correctly create newList ?
A. newList ← Combine (list1, list2)
newList ← Sort (newList)
newList ← RemoveDuplicates (newList)
B. list1 ← Sort (list1)
list2 ← Sort (list2)
newList ← Combine (list1, list2)
newList ← RemoveDuplicates (newList)
C. list1 ← RemoveDuplicates (list1)
list2 ← RemoveDuplicates (list2)
newList ← Combine (list1, list2)
newList ← Sort (newList)
D. list1 ← RemoveDuplicates (list1)
list1 ← Sort (list1)
list2 ← RemoveDuplicates (list2)
list2 ← Sort (list2)
newList ← Combine (list1, list2)
Source: AP Course and Exam Description; Taken from: APClassroom 4