I want to build an efficient container for storing a large database of

student records.

$$ The main operation I am going to be performing frequently on this container, once it is constructed, is to query it to retrieve the list of all students by their birth year. For instance, if the query says $1998,$ then the function will return all student records that have the birth year $1998.$

$$ I will also be doing the occasional insertions to incrementally grow

the database over the years, and the occasional removals to do some rare purges. You can assume removals to be very rare.

For the above tasks, I am considering implementing the container as a hash table.

Based on the above specification,

a$)$ Which of the hash table collision resolution schemes will you adopt

for the design of your hash table? Please provide a brief justification

for your choice.

b$)$ Can you write a simple and efficient hash function for your hash

table?