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Hard Difficulty Questions

Practise Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer PCEP practice questions — original exam-style scenarios covering every exam domain, with detailed explanations, wrong-answer analysis, and common exam traps.

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Scenario guide

How to approach hard difficulty questions

These are the questions most candidates get wrong. They require connecting multiple concepts, reading tricky output, or knowing edge-case behaviour that isn't on most study cards. Practising them trains you to operate under uncertainty — a necessary skill on the real exam.

Quick answer

Hard Difficulty Questions questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

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Related PCEP topic practice pages

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Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. What is the printed value?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

```python
x = 5
y = 2
z = x ** y + x % y * 2
print(z)
```
Question 2hardmultiple choice
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You are a developer in a financial firm. Your team is building a Python module that performs complex calculations on large datasets. To improve performance, you are using list comprehensions and built-in functions. Your code passes all unit tests, but during integration testing, the memory usage spikes unexpectedly. The problematic area is a function that constructs a large list of intermediate results using a list comprehension that references a generator. The code is:

def process(data):

results = [expensive_transform(x) for x in data]

# further processing on results

You suspect that the list comprehension stores all results in memory at once, but you need to keep the function's output as a list for subsequent operations. What is the best solution to reduce memory without changing the function's return type?

Question 3hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. What is the output of the code?

Exhibit

>>> my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> for i in range(len(my_list)):
...     if my_list[i] % 2 == 0:
...         my_list[i] = my_list[i] * 2
...     else:
...         my_list[i] = my_list[i] + 1
>>> print(my_list)
Question 4hardmultiple choice
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A developer writes: a = 3; b = 4; c = a + b / 2. What is the value of c?

Question 5hardmulti select
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Which THREE of the following are valid ways to iterate over a list?

Question 6hardmultiple choice
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Which of the following will raise a TypeError?

Question 7hardmulti select
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Which TWO of the following expressions will evaluate to True?

Question 8hardmulti select
Study the full Python automation breakdown →

Which TWO operators in Python yield an integer result when applied to two integers?

Question 9hardmultiple choice
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You are maintaining a legacy Python 2.7 script that calculates shipping costs. The script reads weight from user input, then calculates cost as weight * 1.5. Recently, the company upgraded to Python 3.9, and now the script raises a TypeError: can't multiply sequence by non-int of type 'float'. The input line is: weight = input('Enter weight: '). You need to fix the script minimally. Which action should you take?

Question 10hardmultiple choice
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A junior developer is working on a script that processes user data. The script reads a CSV file into a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary represents a user with keys 'name', 'age', and 'email'. The developer needs to filter out users under 18 and store their names in a list. The current code is:

users = [{'name': 'Alice', 'age': 17, 'email': 'alice@example.com'}, {'name': 'Bob', 'age': 22, 'email': 'bob@example.com'}]

minors = []

for user in users:
    if user['age'] < 18:

minors.append(user['name'])

print(minors)

The code works, but the senior developer says it is not idiomatic and suggests a more concise solution. Which of the following approaches is the best replacement?

Question 11hardmultiple choice
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A system administrator wrote a Python script to monitor disk usage. The script reads the output of a system command that returns a string like 'Used: 45%' and extracts the percentage. The code uses slicing to get the numeric part and converts to int. However, on some servers, the output format changes to 'Used: 45.2%', causing a ValueError when converting to int. The administrator needs a robust solution that works with both integer and floating-point percentages while still producing an integer result (e.g., 45 for 45.2%). Which option is the best approach?

Question 12hardmultiple choice
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What is the output of the following code? ```python x = 10 y = 3

print(x // y * y + x % y)

```

Question 13hardmultiple choice
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Refer to the exhibit. A beginner Python programmer executes the code and gets an error. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

>>> x = 10
>>> y = "20"
>>> print(x + y)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'
Question 14hardmultiple choice
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Consider: x = True; y = False; z = x and not y or x. What is the value of z?

Question 15hardmulti select
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Which three of the following statements about lists are true? (Choose three.)

Question 16hardmultiple choice
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What is the output of print(type(3 + 4.5))?

Question 17hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. What is the output of the code?

Exhibit

>>> x = 10
>>> while x > 0:
...     x = x - 3
...     if x == 4:
...         break
... else:
...     print('Loop ended normally')
>>> print(x)
Question 18hardmultiple choice
Full question →

What is the result of the expression: (1 and 0) or (not False and True)?

These PCEP practice questions are part of Courseiva's free Python Institute certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style PCEP questions with detailed explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics.