A Level Computer Science OCR Practice Exam 2025 - Free Practice Questions and Study Guide

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What is the fundamental approach taken by Merge Sort?

It divides the array into two halves and sorts them recursively

Merge Sort employs a divide-and-conquer strategy as its fundamental approach. This means that it first splits the array into two halves, sorting each half recursively until the base case is reached, where each sub-array contains a single element. Since a single-element array is inherently sorted, the algorithm then proceeds to merge these sorted halves back together in a sorted manner. This two-step process of dividing and merging continues until the entire array is sorted.

This method is efficient, with a time complexity of O(n log n), which makes it suitable for large datasets. The merging process ensures that the elements from the divided arrays are combined in a way that maintains order, contrasting with other sorting algorithms which may use simpler or less efficient methods.

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It compares and swaps adjacent elements until sorted

It stores each element in a global variable

It collects all values into a single local scope

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