Answer from cs61c-ch (hani aldhafari 14962689) for Question 2
if, while, goto, do while, for, could all be used to make decisions. mips only has set byte.. which sets a given byte to 1 if the statement is true.. else 0 otherwise. the designers of MIPS only included one instruction because assembly should be a language of the most simplest instructions. in other words, it wanted to give the programmer only the most basic functions that everything else could be built from.