ISRO CS 2016 - Question 67

This question is from the ISRO CS 2016 exam. It is about finding the second lowest element in an array of integers.

Problem Statement

Given an array of integers, you need to find the second lowest element in the array. For example, given the array [5, 3, 7, 2, 9, 1], the second lowest element is 2.

Solution

One way to solve this problem is to first sort the array in ascending order, and then return the second element in the sorted array. There are different algorithms to sort an array, but for this problem, we will use the built-in sort() method in Python.

Here's the Python code to solve the problem:

def second_lowest(array):
    # sort the array in ascending order
    sorted_array = sorted(array)
    
    # return the second element in the sorted array
    return sorted_array[1]

Here's how you can use this function with the example array from the problem statement:

array = [5, 3, 7, 2, 9, 1]
second_lowest_number = second_lowest(array)
print(second_lowest_number)

This will output 2.

Conclusion

In this problem, we learned how to find the second lowest element in an array of integers. We used the sort() method to sort the array, and then returned the second element in the sorted array. There are different approaches to solve this problem, but the one presented here is simple and efficient.