How many bits are there in the words cat and whale? - briefly
The word "cat" consists of 3 characters, and "whale" consists of 5 characters. When encoded using ASCII, "cat" requires 24 bits, and "whale" requires 40 bits, as each character is represented by 8 bits.
How many bits are there in the words cat and whale? - in detail
To determine the number of bits in the words "cat" and "whale," it is essential to understand the process of converting characters into binary form. This involves several steps, including character encoding and binary representation.
Characters in modern computing are typically represented using standardized encoding schemes such as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode. ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding standard that represents 128 characters, including letters, digits, and some special characters. Unicode, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive standard that can represent a vast array of characters from various languages and symbols.
For the purpose of this explanation, we will use ASCII encoding, which is sufficient for representing the English alphabet.
First, let's consider the word "cat":
- The character 'c' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 99. In binary, 99 is 01100011.
- The character 'a' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 97. In binary, 97 is 01100001.
- The character 't' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 116. In binary, 116 is 01110100.
Thus, the word "cat" in binary form is: 01100011 01100001 01110100
Each character in ASCII is represented by 7 bits. Since the word "cat" consists of 3 characters, the total number of bits required to represent "cat" is 3 characters * 7 bits/character = 21 bits.
Next, let's consider the word "whale":
- The character 'w' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 119. In binary, 119 is 01110111.
- The character 'h' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 104. In binary, 104 is 01101000.
- The character 'a' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 97. In binary, 97 is 01100001.
- The character 'l' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 108. In binary, 108 is 01101100.
- The character 'e' in ASCII is represented by the decimal number 101. In binary, 101 is 01100101.
Thus, the word "whale" in binary form is: 01110111 01101000 01100001 01101100 01100101
Since the word "whale" consists of 5 characters, the total number of bits required to represent "whale" is 5 characters * 7 bits/character = 35 bits.
In summary, the word "cat" requires 21 bits for representation, while the word "whale" requires 35 bits. This calculation is based on the ASCII encoding scheme, which uses 7 bits per character. For more extensive character sets, such as those found in Unicode, the number of bits per character can vary, typically ranging from 8 to 32 bits, depending on the specific encoding used.