Question

How many bits are there in a byte?

A. 4
B. 6
C. 8
D. 12

Answer 1

Hint: A computer is an electronic machine. It accepts the input, stores and manipulates data, and provides output in the desired form. Computers or any electronic devices understand two values which are zeros and ones which form the Binary Language (0 and 1).

Complete Step-by-step answer: A Digital computer works on binary digits 0 and 1. It can understand information only in terms of 0’s and 1’s. A binary digit is known as the bit. A group of four bits is referred to as a nibble. A group of eight bits is referred to as a byte. Example: 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0. The number of bits that a computer can handle at a time in parallel is known as the word length. 8 bits can make 256 different patterns. A single byte can hold a number between 0 and 255 i.e. with 256 different patterns, one can store a number in the range 0 to 255. One byte is sufficient to hold nearly one typed character i.e. k or D or @. All storage is measured in bytes, despite being very dissimilar hardware.

Therefore the correct answer is Option C.

 Note: A word is 2 bytes (16 bits), a double word is 4 bytes (32 bits), and a quadword is 8 bytes (64 bits). One-byte functions well for individual characters, but computers are also excellent at handling numbers. Integers are usually stored with either 4 or 8 bytes. Four bytes can store numbers ranging from -2147483648 and 2147483647. Eight bytes can store numbers ranging from -9223372036854775808 and 9223372036854775807.