Mod 3 - Digital Information

Question 1

What is discrete information?

Answer 1

It is digital information.
Ex. Digital thermometer b/c you can have either 22.2° or 22.3°, but no temperature in between (can’t have any decimal place more than 0.1

Anything counted is discrete (ex. money)

Question 2

What is continuous information?

Answer 2

It is analog information.
Ex. Mercury thermometer b/c if you look close enough, you can get infinite precision (22.23645° & so on)

Most things are continuous (ex. light, time, distance) but we often digitize values, making them discrete because it’s more convenient.

Question 3

Is a computer discrete or continuous?

Answer 3

It is discrete because a computer cannot have infinite precision. Info is digitized for this purpose, giving a fixed number.

Question 4

Explain computer switches.

Answer 4

Computers use many (billions) internal switches/transistors for logic and memory.. Each switch is off=0 or on=1.

Question 5

How do switches in memory work?

Answer 5

The switches are used to store memory. Each 0 or 1 stored is known as a bit (binary digit). 8 bits=byte

Question 6

What are the binary equivalents?

Answer 6

0 = 0
1 = 1
2 = 10
3 = 11
4 = 100
5 = 101
6 = 110 
7 = 111
8 =1000
etc.

Question 7

I can’t add photos of binary to decimal and vice versa so make sure you look at your notes for that!

Answer 7

Aye, Aye Captain!

Question 8

What is hexadecimal?

Answer 8

It is a numbering system that is by base 16. Its order is: 0-9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 16, 17, 18, etc.
It’s easy to convert b/w hexadecimal & binary, but again, look at your notes for this :)

Question 9

How do you represent a hex number?

Answer 9

Put a # in front of the number (can be seen as 0x42).

ex. #42 (so it doesn’t get confused with decimal number 42)

Question 10

What are the bases of decimal, binary & hexadecimal?

Answer 10

decimal: 10
binary: 2
hexadecimal: 16

Question 11

What is ASCII?

Answer 11

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a standard code for going back and forth between characters and numbers. The hardware understands numbers while the software interprets the meaning of words. The ASCII was later extended to include extra characters that all fit into a single byte.

Question 12

What is Unicode?

Answer 12

It was developed to support characters from around the world (including emojis & accent marks). This system also uses multiple bytes per character.

Question 13

What is UTF-8?

Answer 13

It is used by webpages & websites to insert unicode characters (very versatile). It basically mixes ASCII & Unicode together.