SQA Higher Computing Science Computer Systems overview quiz quiz

By writing the magnitude and putting a minus sign in front

By inverting the bits of the positive value only, with no further step

By storing it in the mantissa of a floating-point number

By inverting the bits of the positive value and adding 1

It lets the processor subtract by adding, so one circuit handles both

It stores far more characters than ASCII can

It removes the need for an address bus

It allows real numbers to be stored without an exponent

The exponent

The mantissa

The sign bus

The control unit

It increases the precision of the stored number

It has no effect on what can be represented

It increases the range of magnitudes that can be stored

It converts the number into an integer

As the actual shape of the letter A

As a real number in floating-point

As an instruction for the control unit

As the binary code for its position in a character set, such as ASCII 65

128

256

65536

Over a million

It cannot represent emoji or non-English characters

Each character can use more bits, so it needs more storage

It can only store 128 different characters

It cannot be used on the web

The data bus

The mantissa

The control unit

Main memory

The data bus, bidirectional

The data bus, processor to memory only

The control unit, both directions

The address bus, one-directional from the processor to memory

Registers

Main memory (RAM)

The hard disk

The address bus

Translates the whole program once into a separate executable file

Translates and executes the program one instruction at a time each run

Stores the program permanently as two's complement

Cools the data centre that runs the program

It reports errors line by line as the program runs

It needs no translation step at all

The compiled program runs faster and can be shared without the source

It can only run on the machine that compiled it

They use electricity, much of it generated by burning fossil fuels

They store data using Unicode instead of ASCII

They rely on two's complement arithmetic

They use an address bus to reach memory

Leaving all servers running continuously at full power

Virtualising workloads onto fewer physical servers

Replacing two's complement with sign-and-magnitude

Storing all text in Unicode

They store characters less efficiently than ASCII

Training and running them is highly energy-intensive, producing large emissions

They remove the need for any data centres

They run only on interpreters, which are slow

251

123

-5

5