What is the primary application of a binary search tree?
Practice Questions
Q1
What is the primary application of a binary search tree?
Sorting data
Searching for data
Storing data in a linear fashion
Graph representation
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What is the primary application of a binary search tree?
Step 1: Understand what a binary search tree (BST) is. A BST is a data structure that stores data in a way that makes it easy to search for items.
Step 2: Learn that in a BST, each node has at most two children. The left child contains values less than the parent node, and the right child contains values greater than the parent node.
Step 3: Recognize that the main purpose of a BST is to allow for fast searching of data. This means you can find items quickly without having to look at every single item.
Step 4: Know that the average time it takes to search for an item in a balanced BST is O(log n), where n is the number of items in the tree. This is much faster than searching through a list, which takes O(n) time.