Answer from cs61c-ei (Jing Chen 16669246) for Question 2
The statements that are involved in making decisions in C include: if, if-then-else, switch statements with a list of cases, loops involving an initial condition being continually satisfied, etc. MIPS has conditional branch instructions such as beq, bne, and slt as well as unconditional jumps like j and jr. The designers of MIPS limit themselves to just the most essential instructions simply because at the machine language level, the number of instructions is directly proportional to the amount of space of hardware it will take up, increasing cost/efficiency/etc. Thus, they wanted to keep the instructions at a bare minimum, reusing basic commands to do procedures fast.