APCS Principles Practice Test

Retrieving data from a server is handled by a method that asks for a resource representation without changing anything on the server. The typical choice for this is GET. It’s designed to be safe and idempotent—repeating the request won’t produce side effects or alter server state—and its responses are cacheable, bookmarkable, and easily pre-fetched. When you click a link or enter a URL, your client usually uses this method to fetch the page or data and receives the resource in the response body (for example, HTML or JSON).

Other common methods are intended for modifying data: POST sends data to create something or trigger an action; PUT updates or creates a resource at a specific URL; DELETE removes a resource. Since the goal here is simply to retrieve data, GET best fits that purpose.