Write a Python program to find the highest 2 values in a dictionary.

Programming Problems · Q8

Q. Write a Python program to find the highest 2 values in a dictionary.

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Concept understanding — Dictionary Key Access

Dictionary Key Access

Imagine you have a physical address book. Each entry has a name (like "Ravi") and a phone number (like "[PII:phone]"). To find Ravi's number, you don't flip through every page — you look up "Ravi" directly. That name is the key, and the number is the value.

A dictionary in programming is exactly that: a collection of key-value pairs. The key is what you know; the value is what you want to retrieve. Key access is the operation of giving the dictionary a key and getting back the value tied to it.

The Intuition

Think of a real dictionary (the book). You look up a word (the key) to find its definition (the value). You never look up a definition to find the word — that would be backwards. Similarly, in a Python dictionary, you always access values by their keys, never the other way around.

Note

Keys must be unique and immutable (strings, numbers, tuples). Values can be anything — numbers, strings, lists, even other dictionaries.

The Precise Statement

In Python, dictionary key access is done using square brackets [] with the key inside, or the .get() method.

Syntax:

dictionary_name[key]

dictionary_name.get(key, default_value)

Example:

student = {"name": "Anjali", "age": 17, "grade": "A"}
print(student["name"])   # Output: Anjali
print(student.get("age")) # Output: 17

What Happens Under the Hood

When you write student["name"], Python:

Takes the key "name".
Computes its hash (a fixed-size number derived from the key's content).
Uses that hash to jump directly to the memory location where the value "Anjali" is stored.

This is why dictionary access is fast — it doesn't scan through all entries. It's a direct lookup, like using an index in a book's index rather than reading every page.

Watch out

If you use a key that does not exist with square brackets, Python raises a KeyError and your program crashes. The .get() method is safer — it returns None (or a default you provide) instead of crashing.

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Sort the values descending and slice the top two.

marks = {"Amit": 78, "Bina": 92, "Chirag": 85, "Deepa": 67, "Esha": 90}
print(sorted(marks.values(), reverse=True)[:2])

[92, 90] …

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Take all the values with d.values(), sort them in descending order, and slice the first

two: sorted(d.values(), reverse=True)[:2]. A variant with sorted(d, key=d.get, ...) also

recovers which keys own those top values.

The idea

The dictionary's values form a plain collection once you call .values(), so "highest 2 values"

reduces to a sort-and-slice on that collection.

Program

# Highest 2 values in a dictionary
marks = {"Amit": 78, "Bina": 92, "Chirag": 85, "Deepa": 67, "Esha": 90}

top_two = sorted(marks.values(), reverse=True)[:2]
print("Highest 2 values:", top_two)

Highest 2 values: [92, 90]

Also want to know WHO scored them?

Sort the keys by their value (key=marks.get tells sorted() to compare each key's value):

top_keys = sorted(marks, key=marks.get, reverse=True)[:2]
for k in top_keys:
    print(k, "->", marks[k])

Bina -> 92
Esha -> 90

Key lines explained: …

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Q.Write a Python program to find the highest 2 values in a dictionary.

The idea

Program

Also want to know WHO scored them?

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