What is the time complexity of accessing an element in an array?
Practice Questions
Q1
What is the time complexity of accessing an element in an array?
O(1)
O(n)
O(log n)
O(n^2)
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What is the time complexity of accessing an element in an array?
Step 1: Understand what an array is. An array is a collection of items stored at contiguous memory locations.
Step 2: Know that each item in an array can be accessed using its index. The index is a number that represents the position of the item in the array.
Step 3: Realize that accessing an element by its index means you can directly jump to that position in memory without needing to look at other elements.
Step 4: Since you can access the element directly, the time it takes to access an element does not depend on the size of the array.
Step 5: Therefore, the time complexity for accessing an element in an array is constant time, which is denoted as O(1).
