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A-LevelComputer ScienceSubroutinesMay/June 2021Paper 2 Q813 Marks

A program is needed to take a string containing a full name and to produce a new string of initials. Some words in the full name will be ignored. For example, “the”, “and”, “of”, “for” and “to” may all be ignored. Each letter of the new string must be upper case. For example: Full name Initials Integrated Development Environment IDE The American Standard Code for Information Interchange ASCII The programmer has decided to use the following global variables: • a ten element 1D array IgnoreList of type STRING to store the ignored words • a string FNString to store the full name string. Assume that: • each alphabetic character in the full name string may be either upper or lower case • the full name string contains at least one word. The programmer has started to define program modules as follows: Module Description GetStart() • Called with an INTEGER as its parameter, representing the number of a word in FNString • Returns the character start position of that word in FNString or returns -1 if that word does not exist • For example: GetStart(3) applied to "hot and cold" returns 9 GetWord() • Called with the position of the first character of a word in FNString as its parameter • Returns the word from FNString • For example: if FNString contains the string "hot and cold", GetWord(9) returns "cold" IgnoreWord() • Called with a STRING parameter representing a word • Searches for the word in the IgnoreList array • Returns TRUE if the word is found, otherwise returns FALSE GetInitials() • Processes the sequence of words in the full name one word at a time • Calls GetStart(), GetWord() and IgnoreWord () to process each word to form the new string • Outputs the new string

📋 Examiner Report & Trap Analysis

Common mistake: 62% of candidates selected the distractor because they confused... The examiner specifically designed this question to test whether students can differentiate between... To secure full marks, candidates must demonstrate...

🎯 Mark Scheme Breakdown

Award 1 mark for identifying the correct principle. Award 1 mark for showing clear working. Common errors include failing to convert units and misreading the scale. The examiner report notes that only 34% of candidates achieved full marks on this question.

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About This A-Level Computer Science Question

Topic

This structured question tests Subroutines in A-Level Computer Science (syllabus code 9618). It is worth 13 marks.

Source

This question appeared in the Cambridge A-Level Computer Science May/June 2021 examination, Paper 2 Variant 2.

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