Question

Consider a list: List1=[90, 10, 2, 3]. What is the difference between the following operations on List1?

a) List1 * 2
b) List1 *= 2
c) List1 = List1 * 2

a) The list is multiplied by 2.
b) The list elements are squared.
c) The list is copied and then multiplied by 2.
d) The list elements are multiplied by 2.

Answer 1

The operations a), b), and c) all repeat the elements in the list twice, resulting in doubling the length of the sequence. None of these operations involve squaring or individually multiplying the elements by 2.

Step-by-step explanation:

The operations on List1=[90, 10, 2, 3] affect the list in different ways:

• a) List1 * 2: This operation concatenates the list with itself, resulting in a new list with the sequence of elements repeated. The output will be [90, 10, 2, 3, 90, 10, 2, 3].
• b) List1 *= 2: Known as the in-place multiplication operator, it modifies the original list by repeating its elements, similar to the first operation but without creating a new list.
• c) List1 = List1 * 2: This operation is the same as the first one, it creates a new list with the elements of List1 repeated, and then reassigns List1 to reference the new list.

None of the operations squares the elements or multiplies each element by 2. Instead, they all result in a list that is repeated or 'multiplied' in terms of sequence length. Therefore, the correct answer would be a) The list is multiplied by 2.