ITL - Equivalent Ways to Examine Data (Lesson)

Equivalent Ways to Express Meaning

Another item to watch out for on the multiple choice test is equivalent terms/symbols.

 

Example

Try the following questions yourself and then check your answers and reasoning.  After examining the question and choosing your answer, click on the forward > sign and read the detailed solution.  

The first example here requires elimination or agreement that all must be right.  Be careful to look for consistency in the complete answers, not that only a part of the answer is true.  You need to remember to read the complete question and to read each of the answers for validity.

Example Two

Example 2 requires that you trace code.  Remember indented is considered a body of code to go with the non-indented statement above.  However, the non-indented statement above the indented code must be a statement that allows for a grouping (body) of code to go with it.  Statements that allow for a body of code to be included within the statement for execution are if-else, while, count, for each, do Together, etc. 

Example Three

This last example, Example 3, provides a look at what College Board calls a multi-select question.  You must find the best two answers out of the group of answers. These questions require careful elimination.

Boxes or Notations

At times in the AP Exam you will see boxes used to highlight coding statements indicating a block language. Alice used a form of block language as the Alice code offered some code written and other parts as a choice of options for the programmer. These boxes or notations are flow-chart notations that we studied earlier in the courses.

Note that the changes here are basically the flow chart symbols in use with the diagram. Nothing more. Everything works as you have learned. The right-hand answer is assigned to the left-hand variable, and yes, unlike math, the variable is used on both sides. Remember the = or ← means assign to.

We will see examples of the text code and the block code in the AP Exam Reference.  The Reviews of all of this will be in the College Board pages that follow.  Remember, part of learning to code is taking concepts in languages and understanding the concept though the word has changed.  In Alice3 we use count up to x and in the College Board language they will use repeat x times where x could be a variable of a set number.  Both do exactly the same thing.  The underlying concept that we understand is that we are doing a loop for so many times.  The only way out without doing the complete loop the required number of times would be to be in a method (procedure or function) that has a return.  A return in the middle of the loop exits the loop and the method immediately.

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