
IB final exams are very close now – with the timing of the Easter holidays we have fewer than three schools weeks remaining. Every students’ revision should be in full swing. If you have practised and practised ITGS past papers and new some more questions, here are two for you. These are not official IB questions but they should help you practise exam skills. The first question covers Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Expert Systems and so is HL only. The second question covers core content. If you have finished these questions you may want to try the paper 1 questions I posted a few weeks ago.
Before trying past paper questions it is a good idea to remind yourself of the IB Command Terms. Examples and definitions of these can be found here.
Question 1 (HL only)
“A factory contains an area where all work is performed by robots. The area is fenced and human workers are not supposed to enter while the robots are working. When the fence is opened, it automatically cuts off the power to the robots. A worker jumped over the fence to repair a robot that was malfunctioning. Another robot, bringing spare parts to the malfunctioning robot, pinned the worker against a machine, killing him.” (Gift of Fire, Sara Baase, pp186 ISBN 0-13-121988)
a) | Define the term ‘robot’ | [2 marks] |
b) | Identify two types of sensor a robot might use. | [2 marks] |
b) | Describe two changes that could be made to improve the safety of the robot. | [4 marks] |
c) | Explain two social impacts, other than safety, of using robots which may be unreliable. | [4 marks] |
d) | Evaluate the impact of industrial robots such as these. | [8 marks] |
Question 2

Photo sharing websites such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) are very popular. Such sites allow anybody with an account to upload as many pictures as they wish. By default, anybody else (even those without a Flickr account) can view and comment on all uploaded pictures. Only users with an account are able to upload pictures.
A teacher who recently went on a school trip took numerous photographs. Upon returning to school, the teacher planned to upload the photographs from the trip to a website such as Flickr.
a) | The teacher used a digital camera. Describe one device that this camera could use to store pictures. | [2 marks] |
b) | Define the term ‘citizen journalism‘. | [2 marks] |
c) | Distinguish lossless compression and lossy compression. | [4 marks] |
d) | Describe two concerns schools may have about the uploading of school pictures to a site such as Flickr. | [4 marks] |
e) | Discuss the methods the administrators of Flickr could use to prevent their site being used to distribute copyrighted photographs. Evaluate your arguments. | [8 marks] |
There are lots of other revision resources on this site, including examples of practice questions, a list of ITGS past paper questions to help you revise specific topics, plus IB past papers accessible from our VLE.


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