Low Level Processing - ASCII, UNICODE & Floating Point Notation

Question 1

What is ASCII?

Answer 1

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a 7 bit code which characters have a unique binary value

Question 2

What is UNICODE?

Answer 2

A 16 bit code that contains all 256 ASCII values within it

Question 3

What are advantages of UNICODE over ASCII? (3)

Answer 3

• It contains every character based alphabet in the world
• It contains all punctuation and control characters
• It contains graphic languages such as Chinese

Question 4

What is Floating Point Notation used to represent?

Answer 4

Real numbers and very large numbers

Question 5

What is a floating point number made up of?

Answer 5

A mantissa and an exponent

Question 6

What will increasing the number of bits for the mantissa do?

Answer 6

It will increase the accuracy and precision of a number

Question 7

What will increasing the number of the bits for the exponent do?

Answer 7

It will increase the range of numbers which can be stored

Question 8

Why is floating point notation used to store very large numbers?

Answer 8

These large numbers can be stored with just a few bytes