Final answer:
To read students' names and marks from a data file and calculate their total marks and percentage, a program must open the file, read the contents, perform calculations, and output the results. This involves summing the marks for each subject and calculating the percentage of the total possible marks.
Step-by-step explanation:
To read students' names and marks for five subjects from a data file, calculate total marks and percentage, you would write a program that performs several steps. First, the program must open the data file and read each student's name along with their marks in the five subjects. After reading the data, the program will calculate the total marks for each student by adding the marks from all subjects. Then, to find the percentage, the program will divide the total marks by the maximum possible marks and multiply by 100. Below is an example of how this could be done in a programming language like Python:
student_data = read_data('students.txt') # Assume this function reads data from the file
for student in student_data:
total_marks = sum(student['marks'])
percentage = (total_marks / (100 * 5)) * 100 # If each subject is out of 100
print(f"{student['name']}: Total Marks = {total_marks}, Percentage = {percentage:.2f}%")
This program assumes that 'read_data' is a function that reads the student data from a text file named 'students.txt', which would contain the names of the students and their marks in a structured format.
Note: In actual implementation, you would need to account for different data formats, handle potential errors with file reading, and ensure the program can calculate correct percentages based on how the data is structured in the file.