Final answer:
An ASCII file represents each character with a 7-bit binary number. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it allows for 128 different characters to be encoded.
Step-by-step explanation:
In an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number. This encoding standard was long used as the basic building block for representing text in computers and electronic devices that use text. It allows for 128 different characters, including upper and lower case alphabetic characters, numerals, and a range of special characters. While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Extended ASCII expands this to allow for 256 characters using 8 bits instead of 7. Unicode and EBCDIC are different encoding standards, with Unicode especially designed for a much wider representation of characters supporting international text.