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England · AQAQ&A
Computer ScienceQ&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every England Computer Science syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
3.5 Fundamentals of computer networks
- Understand the methods used to keep a network secure, including authentication, encryption, firewalls and MAC address filtering.2Q&A pairs
- Understand what a network is, the difference between a LAN and a WAN, and the star and bus (mesh) network topologies.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the purpose of network protocols, the common protocols and ports, and the four-layer TCP/IP model and why layering is used.2Q&A pairs
- Compare wired and wireless connectivity, understand how Wi-Fi works, and the role of encryption in wireless networks.2Q&A pairs
3.4 Computer systems
- Understand the AND, OR and NOT logic gates, construct and interpret truth tables, and build and read simple logic circuits.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the difference between hardware and software, and the relationship between them in a computer system.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the difference between RAM and ROM, the purpose of each, and the need for virtual memory and cache.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the need for secondary storage and compare the three types: magnetic, optical and solid state.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the role of the operating system and its functions, and the purpose of common utility software.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the purpose and components of the CPU, the fetch-execute cycle, and the factors that affect CPU performance.2Q&A pairs
3.6 Cyber security
- Understand the main cyber security threats, including the difference between vulnerabilities and attacks, and forms such as brute-force and denial-of-service attacks.2Q&A pairs
- Understand what malware is and the main forms, including viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and ransomware, and the harm each can cause.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the methods used to detect and prevent cyber security threats, including penetration testing, anti-malware, firewalls, user access levels, passwords and encryption.2Q&A pairs
- Understand social engineering, including phishing, shouldering and pretexting, and why people are often the weakest point in security.2Q&A pairs
3.8 Ethical, legal and environmental impacts
- Understand the environmental impact of digital technology, including energy use, e-waste and the use of finite raw materials, and how impacts can be reduced.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the ethical, legal and cultural issues raised by digital technology and how stakeholders are affected.3Q&A pairs
- Understand privacy issues and the key UK legislation, including the Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse Act and copyright law.2Q&A pairs
3.1 Fundamentals of algorithms
- Computational thinking through abstraction, decomposition and algorithmic thinking, and understanding what an algorithm is and the difference between an algorithm and a program.2Q&A pairs
- Represent and interpret algorithms using flowcharts and pseudocode, recognise the standard flowchart symbols, and read and write AQA-style pseudocode.3Q&A pairs
- Understand and explain how the linear search and binary search algorithms work, trace each one, and compare them including the requirement that binary search needs a sorted list.2Q&A pairs
- Understand and explain how the bubble sort and merge sort algorithms work, trace each one, and compare them in terms of method and efficiency.2Q&A pairs
3.3 Fundamentals of data representation
- Add binary numbers up to and including three 8-bit numbers, recognise overflow, and apply logical and arithmetic binary shifts.2Q&A pairs
- Understand how characters are represented using ASCII and Unicode character sets, and the effect of the character set on storage and the range of characters.2Q&A pairs
- Understand why data is compressed, and the difference between lossy and lossless compression including run-length encoding and Huffman coding.2Q&A pairs
- Understand hexadecimal, convert between binary, denary and hexadecimal, and explain why hexadecimal is used.2Q&A pairs
- Understand the binary, denary and hexadecimal number bases, why computers use binary, and convert between binary and denary.2Q&A pairs
- Understand how a bitmap image is represented using pixels and colour depth, the effect of resolution and colour depth on quality and file size, and the role of metadata.2Q&A pairs
- Understand how analogue sound is sampled to be stored digitally, the effect of sample rate and bit depth on quality and file size, and calculate sound file sizes.2Q&A pairs
- Know that data is stored in bits and bytes, the units from bit to terabyte, and calculate file sizes and storage requirements.2Q&A pairs
3.2 Programming
- Use arithmetic operators including integer division and modulus, comparison operators, and the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT, applying correct operator precedence.2Q&A pairs
- Use one-dimensional and two-dimensional arrays and records to store collections of data, and access elements using indexes and field names.2Q&A pairs
- Use the common data types, declare and assign variables and constants, and understand the difference between a variable and a constant.2Q&A pairs
- Read from and write to a text file, including opening, reading line by line, writing and closing a file, so that data persists after the program ends.2Q&A pairs
- Use the three programming constructs of sequence, selection and iteration, including definite and indefinite iteration, and nest them.3Q&A pairs
- Use common string-handling operations including length, position, substring, concatenation, and converting between case and between strings and numbers.2Q&A pairs
- Apply the principles of structured programming, breaking a problem into subroutines with clear interfaces, and explain the benefits of this approach.2Q&A pairs
- Use subroutines (procedures and functions), pass parameters and return values, and understand the scope of local and global variables.2Q&A pairs