How many bits and bytes are required to store the following word

How many bits and bytes are required to store the following word

The Correct Answer and Explanation is:

To determine how many bits and bytes are required to store the word “Generate,” we need to analyze how text is stored in digital systems.

Storage Calculation

  1. Each character in a text string is stored using a specific encoding system, such as ASCII or UTF-8.
  2. In standard ASCII encoding, each character requires 8 bits (or 1 byte).
  3. The word “Generate” has 8 characters.
  4. Since each character is 1 byte (8 bits), the total storage required is:
    • 8 bytes
    • 64 bits (since 8 bytes × 8 bits/byte = 64 bits)

Detailed Explanation

Text data in computers is stored as binary values, where each letter is converted into a sequence of ones and zeros. The standard method used is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which assigns a unique number to each character.

For example:

  • The letter ‘G’ is stored as 01000111 in ASCII, which consists of 8 bits.
  • The letter ‘e’ is stored as 01100101, also using 8 bits.
  • This process continues for all letters in the word “Generate”, ensuring each character occupies precisely 8 bits (1 byte).

Computers store text this way to efficiently process, manipulate, and transmit data. Alternative character encoding systems like Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16) may use variable-length encoding, meaning some characters take up more than 8 bits, but in this case, ASCII suffices.

Thus, the word “Generate” requires 8 bytes or 64 bits to be stored in memory using ASCII encoding

Scroll to Top