What is the worst-case time complexity of inserting an element at the beginning
Practice Questions
Q1
What is the worst-case time complexity of inserting an element at the beginning of a singly linked list?
O(1)
O(n)
O(log n)
O(n log n)
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What is the worst-case time complexity of inserting an element at the beginning of a singly linked list?
Step 1: Understand what a singly linked list is. It is a data structure where each element (node) points to the next one.
Step 2: Know that inserting an element at the beginning means adding a new node before the first node.
Step 3: Realize that to insert a new node, you only need to change a few pointers: the new node's next pointer will point to the current first node, and then the head pointer will point to the new node.
Step 4: Since this operation does not depend on the number of elements in the list, it takes the same amount of time regardless of the list size.
Step 5: Therefore, the time complexity for this operation is constant, which is denoted as O(1).
