AP Computer Science Principles Practice Exam

Which of the following is LEAST likely to indicate a phishing attack?

• An e-mail from your bank asks you to call the number on your card to verify a transaction

• An e-mail from a merchant asks that you click on a link to reset your password

• An e-mail from a utility company asks you to enter your date of birth and social security number for verification purposes

• An e-mail indicates that you have won a large sum of money and asks you to enter your bank account number so that the money can be transferred to you

Which of the following activities poses the greatest personal cybersecurity risk?

• Making a purchase at an online store that uses public key encryption to transmit credit card information

• Paying a bill using a secure electronic payment system

• Reserving a hotel room by e-mailing a credit card number to a hotel

• Withdrawing money from a bank account using an automated teller machine (ATM)

Which of the following best describes a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack?

• An attempt by a country to deny its citizens access to the Internet

• An attempt to deny users access to a Web site's resources by flooding the Web site with requests from multiple systems

• An attempt by one user to deny service to another user by posting material on a social network

• An attempt by a user of the Internet to get private information from a secure database

A program is expressed in a programming language. Which of the following is true of the program?

• The program can also be expressed as binary code, but will be more easily understood by humans when expressed in a higher-level programming language.

• The program can also be expressed as binary code, which will reduce the likelihood of errors.

• The program cannot be expressed as binary code, because binary code can only be used to represent data.

• Some parts of the program can be expressed as binary code, but operations must be expressed using a higher-level programming language.

Which of the following statements best describes the properties of public key encryption?

• Public key encryption is an encryption method which relies on separate keys for encrypting and decrypting information.

• Public key encryption is a highly secure encryption scheme that in which a single key is used by both the sender and receiver of the message.

• Public key encryption makes use of certain types of problems which are easier for humans to solve than computers.

• Public key encryption makes use of mathematical problems which no algorithm can be used to solve.

A flowchart is a way to visually represent an algorithm. The flowchart above uses the building blocks from the table above.

Which of the following statements best describes the behavior of the algorithm depicted in the flowchart?

Assume a always starts greater than b.

• It displays the sum of a and b.

• It displays the difference between a and b.

• It displays the product of a and b

• It runs in an infinite loop.

Consider the process of encoding and decoding a message using the following Caesar cipher encoding scheme in which the plaintext and ciphertext alphabets are offset by four positions, as shown above.

Which of the following encoded ciphertext strings decodes to an original plaintext message of “secret”?

• ersecr

• wigvix

• kwujwl

• oaynap

Which of the following best defines confidentiality in context with information and data?

• The ability to limit access to information to a certain set of users

• The certainty that information is accurate

• The confirmation that a company will not sell your information to others

• The reliability of access to information

Which of the following is true about low level computer languages?

I. Low level languages give the programmer more control over how system resources are used.

II. Code in a programming language is often translated into code in another (lower level) language to be executed on a computer.

III. Low level programming languages are designed to be easier for people to read and write.

• II only

• I and III only

• I and II only

• ii and III only

A large office building has an elevator that carries occupants between any of the building's 10 floors. The basement is referred to as "Level 0" while the topmost floor is "Level 9." The software for the elevator uses a variable, called level, to track the floor number of the elevator's current position. When a person presses a button requesting the elevator to rise to a higher floor, the above code is executed.

What is displayed if the elevator is currently on the 7th floor (level = 7) and the person on the elevator presses a button that says to go up 3 floors (floors = 3)?

• Level 7 Level 8 Level 9

• Level 8 Level 9 Cannot go up. Level 9

• Level 8 Level 9 Level 10

• Cannot go up.