October/november 2021 Paper 3

Question 1

1. II, what is the consequence of storing a binary numbers as a floating point number (2)

Answer 1

Precision of the number would be reduced, this is because the least significant bits have been truncated

Question 2

1b, explain why binary numbers are stored in a normalised format (3)

Answer 2

• to store the maximum range of number in the minimum number of bytes
• normalisation reduces the amount for leading 1/0s
• allows large/small numbers to be portrayed