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Course: AP®︎/College Computer Science Principles > Unit 9

Lesson 3: Practice passage-based questions
Computing
AP®︎/College Computer Science Principles
Exam preparation
Practice passage-based questions
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Passage-based question 1

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Problem

These five questions all refer to the information below. The information is the same for each question.
  • A state government holds elections each year. In the past, they allowed only in-person voting and voting by mailing in a ballot. They decide to replace the mail-in ballot system with an online ballot system instead.
  • The new online ballot system sends a mail to residents with a PIN (Personal Identification Number), and then asks them to login with both that PIN and their government-issued Social Security number.
  • The old mail-in ballot system stored the ballots in a paper filing system in a secured government office, while the new online ballot system stores the votes in a database.
The original mail-in ballot system and the new online ballot system are described in the following flowcharts. Each flowchart uses the following blocks:
BlockExplanation
OvalThe start of the algorithm
ParallelogramAn input or output step
DiamondA conditional or decision step, where execution proceeds to the side labeled "Yes" if the answer to the question is yes and to the side labeled "No" if the answer is no
RectangleThe result of the algorithm
A flowchart of the mail-in ballot system:
  • An oval labeled "Start" points to a parallelogram.
  • The parallelogram is labeled "Voter receives ballot in mail" and points to another parallelogram.
  • The parallelogram is labeled "Voter fills out ballot and mails it" and points to another parallelogram.
  • The parallelogram is labeled "Government office receives ballot" and points to a diamond.
  • The diamond is labeled "Is the ballot correctly filled out?" and has arrows labeled "Yes" and "No".
  • The arrow labeled "No" points to a rectangle labeled "Vote is thrown out".
  • The arrow labeled "Yes" points to a rectangle labeled "Vote is counted".
A flowchart of the online ballot system:
  • An oval labeled "Start" points to a parallelogram.
  • The parallelogram is labeled "Voter receives PIN in mail" and points to another parallelogram.
  • The parallelogram is labeled "Voters enters PIN and SSN on website" and points to a diamond.
  • The diamond is labeled "Do the PIN and SSN correspond to valid voter?" and has arrows labeled "Yes" and "No".
  • The arrow labeled "No" leads to a rectangle labeled "Voter is denied access".
  • The arrow labeled "Yes" leads to a parallelogram labeled "Voter fills out online ballot" which has an arrow leaving to a rectangle.
  • The rectangle is labeled "Vote is stored in database".
Which of the following data is needed by the online ballot system but not the mail-in ballot system?
Choose 1 answer: