Fundamentals of data representation

Question 1

What is a natural number?

Answer 1

Natural numbers (N) are positive whole numbers.

Question 2

What is an integer?

Answer 2

Integer numbers (Z) are whole numbers both positive and negative.

Question 3

What is a rational number?

Answer 3

Rational numbers (Q) are numbers that can be written as fractions.

Question 4

What is an irrational number?

Answer 4

Irrational numbers are numbers that cannot be written as fractions.

Question 5

What is a real number?

Answer 5

Real numbers (R) are real world quantities that include: natural, rational and irrational numbers.

Question 6

What is an ordinal number?

Answer 6

Ordinal numbers are used to describe the positions of objects.

Question 7

What base is decimal?

Answer 7

Base 10

Question 8

What base are binary numbers?

Answer 8

Base 2

Question 9

What base is hexadecimal?

Answer 9

Base 16

Question 10

What can a bit represent?

Answer 10

0 or 1

Question 11

How many different values can be represented with n bits?

Answer 11

2^n

Question 12

What do Ki, Mi, Gi and Ti represent?

Answer 12

Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes, Tebibytes

Question 13

Is a Gibibyte or a Gigabyte bigger?

Answer 13

Gibibyte

Question 14

What are the minimum and maximum values of n number of bits?

Answer 14

Minimum = 0, Maximum = 2n-1

Question 15

How do you tell if a floating point number is normalised?

Answer 15

It either begins with a 0 followed by a 1 or a 1 followed by a 0.

Question 16

How can you tell if a signed binary number is negative?

Answer 16

The most significant bit is a 1.

Question 17

Why is fixed/floating point inaccurate?

Answer 17

It isn’t able to represent all decimal numbers (0.1, 0.3…)

Question 18

How do you calculate absolute error?

Answer 18

Approximated Value - Actual Value

Question 19

How do you calculate relative error?

Answer 19

(Approximated Value - Actual Value)/Actual Value

Question 20

How does binary underflow occur?

Answer 20

When the binary digit is deemed close enough to 0 to be negligible (divide a very small number by a very large number)

Question 21

How does binary overflow occur?

Answer 21

When the binary digit exceeds the allocated number of bits (multiply a big number by a big number)