Year 8 – Representations: from clay to silicon Solutions to learner worksheet

Lesson 5 – Large quantities

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Bits and bytes: solutions

Problem 1 Simple
A user comes across a small text file in her hard disk. The name of the file is ‘simple’ and
its size is 12 bytes.

Name Size Type

simple 12 bytes Text

Question Your answer ▿

How many binary digits (bits) Number of bits in the file: 96 bits
does this file contain?
There are 8 bits in a byte.

So there are 8 x 12 = 96 bits in the file.

Problem 2 Symbols
The table below contains examples of a few symbols, and their binary encodings in the
UTF-8 coding scheme.

Fill in the last column of the table: how many bytes are required for each of the
characters?

Binary Number of bytes

Character Number of bits
Representation ▿

@ 01000000 8 8 / 8 = 1 byte

11000010
£ 10100011
16 16 / 8 = 2 bytes

11100010
⁂ 10000001 24 24 / 8 = 3 bytes
10000010

11110000
10011101
𝄞 32 32 / 8 = 4 bytes
10000100
10011110

Page 1 Last updated: 09-09-19

Year 8 – Representations: from clay to silicon Solutions to learner worksheet
Lesson 5 – Large quantities
Save a copy

Problem 3 ASCII art

ASCII art involves creating pictures using characters (such as letters, symbols, and
numbers). Here is an example:

! |\_/| !
! -(@ @)- !
!--oOO--(_)-OOo---!

Questions Your answers ▿

Every character is represented by Bytes for each character: 1 byte

a sequence of 8 bits.

How many bytes are required for

There are 8 bits in a byte,
one individual character in the so 1 byte is required for each character.
image?

In this image, there are 3 lines, with Total number of characters in the image:
20 characters in each line. 60 characters
This includes spaces and the special
characters that move to the next line. There are 3 x 20 = 60 characters in the
image.
How many characters are in the
image in total?

How many bits are required for
representing the entire image?
How many bytes are required for
representing the entire image?
Bits for the entire image: 480 bits
There are 60 characters in the image.
Each character requires 8 bits,
so the image requires 60 x 8 = 480 bits.
Bytes for the entire image: 60 bytes
There are 60 characters in the image.
Each character requires 1 byte,
so the image requires 60 bytes.

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This resource is licensed under the Open Government Licence, version 3. For more information on this
licence, see ncce.io/ogl.

Page 2 Last updated: 09-09-19