Question

Consider the following code segment.

int a = 100;
while (a > 1)
{
System.out.println("$");
a /= 2;
}
How many $’s are printed as a result of executing the code segment?
A. 0
B. 5
C. 6
D. 7
E. 50

Answer 1

The loop in the code snippet will run 7 times, each time printing the $ character, before the variable 'a' is no longer greater than 1. Therefore, the correct answer is D. 7.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student has provided a segment of code and is asking how many times a character ($) would be printed as a result of its execution. The relevant part of the code to consider is the while loop. Here the int variable a starts at 100 and is divided by 2 in each iteration of the loop until a is no longer greater than 1. To find out how many times the loop will run and consequently how many $'s will be printed, we can simply perform the division until the condition is not met:

• a = 100
• a = 50
• a = 25
• a = 12.5
• a = 6.25
• a = 3.125
• a = 1.5625

After these steps, a will no longer be greater than 1, which means the loop runs 7 times, and prints the $ character 7 times. Thus, the correct answer is D. 7.