STUDY MATERIAL · GATE CS
GATE C Programming: questions and notes
Programming in C questions from 10 GATE papers (2018–2026) with the official answers, each solved step by step, plus notes for each topic, a formula sheet and practice questions.
- previous-year questions
- 34previous-year questions
- solved step by step
- 34solved step by step
- GATE papers, 2018–2026
- 10GATE papers, 2018–2026
- topics with notes
- 4topics with notes
TOPICS
Four topics, in the order they are taught
Taken from the official GATE 2027 syllabus. Each topic has notes, the formulas you need, its previous-year questions with the official answers and step-by-step solutions, and practice questions.
C fundamentals: types, operators, expressions and control flow
Programming in C fundamentals covers how a value is stored (its type and size), how it is transformed before and during an operation (promotions, conversions, wraparound and overflow), how operators combine values (precedence, associativity, short-circuiting and sequencing), and how control constructs decide what runs next (switch fall-through, loops with break and continue).
7 previous-year questions · 11 marks · 5 practice questions
Pointers, arrays and strings in C
Pointers, arrays and strings are where C's memory model shows through its syntax.
11 previous-year questions · 16 marks · 7 practice questions
Functions, parameter passing, scope and storage classes
This topic covers how C functions communicate with their callers and how their variables live and die.
7 previous-year questions · 9 marks · 5 practice questions
Recursion: tracing recursive programs
Recursion lets a function solve a problem by calling itself on a smaller instance until a base case is reached.
9 previous-year questions · 16 marks · 6 practice questions
QUESTIONS BY TOPIC AND YEAR
34 questions, by topic and year
How many questions each topic had in the CS papers of each year. This shows what was asked, not what will be asked. We placed each question under a topic ourselves; the exam paper does not label topics. Every question links back to its paper.
| Topic | 2018 | 2020 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C basics | 1 | · | 1 | · | 3 | 2 | · | 7 |
| Pointers & arrays | 1 | 2 | 2 | · | 2 | 3 | 1 | 11 |
| Functions & scope | 1 | · | · | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 |
| Recursion | 2 | 1 | · | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 9 |
GATE CSE question papers with solutions: 2026 Set 1, 2026 Set 2, 2025 Set 1, 2025 Set 2, 2024 Set 1, 2024 Set 2, 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018
The 2019 and 2021 papers are not included: the copies we host are scans. GATE 2023 comes from IIT Kanpur's own copy of the paper and its answer key, which numbers the CS questions Q.11 to Q.65. For 2024, 2025 and 2026 both sessions (CS1 and CS2) are included.
C Programming formulas by topic
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THE OFFICIAL SYLLABUS
What each paper lists under Programming in C
From the GATE 2027 syllabus PDF: the first two items of CS Section 4, “Programming and Data Structures”. The rest of that section (arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, binary search trees, binary heaps and graphs) is on the Data Structures and Algorithms page.
GATE CS
Programming in C. Recursion.
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