Chapter 1 Textbook Exercises

Set A

• The book does not go over assignment before this problem set, but you should use it here anyway. Assignment means using equal signs. Here is a really straightforward way to calculate the number of seconds in a year and display it to the screen:

years = 1
days = years*365
hours = days*24
minutes = hours*60
seconds = minutes*60
print(seconds)

If you want to be a little more fancy, try

print('There are', seconds, 'seconds in', years, 'years.')

If you don't like that grammar, try changing the number of years and see what happens. Try checking your answers here.

Set B

• Python sees a difference between an integer and a rational number. When you do division of integers you will notice that a lot of rounding happened. Use floating point math when you need to avoid this kind of rounding.
• Don't know what a factorial is? Find out!
• On most calculators and computers, 2 to the power of 5 is expressed as 2^5. Not in Python!
• rate=distance/time and therefore, distance=rate*time. What does time equal in terms of rate and distance?

Set C

• Use turtle.exitonclick() to at the end of your turtle programs to keep the canvas open. When you click on it, your program will finish.

Set D

• Many problems will ask you to "modify the function __". If you are editing these functions in the same file, you should not have the same name for two different functions. When you modify functions, give the new function a unique name.