Arrays (3)
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1.
A programmer is writing a program to calculate the total cost of items in a shopping basket. The price of each item is stored in an array. The program needs to use a loop to iterate through the array and calculate the total cost. The array is defined as follows:
prices = [2.50, 1.75, 3.00, 1.25, 4.50]
Write pseudocode to show how a loop can be used to calculate the total cost of all items in the shopping basket.
Pseudocode:
- START
- SET
total_cost = 0 - FOR
i = 1 TO length of prices DO:- ADD
prices[i] TO total_cost
- END FOR
- DISPLAY
total_cost - END
2.
Consider an array of student marks in a class. The marks are stored in an array called marks. Write a program (in a language of your choice) that uses a for loop to find the highest mark in the array and display it. Assume the array has at least one element.
Example Python Code:
def findhighestmark(marks):
highest_mark = marks[0] # Assume the first mark is the highest initially
for mark in marks:
if mark > highest_mark:
highest_mark = mark
print("The highest mark is:", highest_mark)
# Example usage:
student_marks = [75, 82, 90, 68, 88]
findhighestmark(student_marks)
3.
Describe what an array is and explain why arrays are useful for storing multiple values of the same data type in a computer program. Give an example of a scenario where using an array would be more efficient than using multiple individual variables.
An array is a data structure that stores a collection of elements of the same data type in contiguous memory locations. It's essentially a named sequence of variables. Arrays are useful because they allow us to store and access multiple values of the same type using a single variable name and an index. This makes it much more efficient than using separate variables for each value.
For example, consider a program that needs to store the scores of 10 students in a test. If we used 10 individual variables (e.g., score1, score2, ... score10), the code would be verbose and difficult to manage. Using an array (e.g., scores[10]) would be much cleaner and more efficient. We can easily access each student's score using the array index (e.g., scores[0] for the first student's score).