Question

While only 7 bits are needed per ASCII code, most computers use 8 bits per ASCII code. If an email message has 500 characters, how many bits would a computer use to store that email, using 8 bits per ASCII code

Answer 1

To store a 500 character email message where each character uses 8 bits per ASCII code, a computer would use 4,000 bits. In terms of bytes, the email will be 500 bytes and will take up roughly 0.488 kilobytes (KB) of storage.

Step-by-step explanation:

If an email message contains 500 characters, and each character is represented by an ASCII code that uses 8 bits, we would calculate the total number of bits used to store the email by multiplying the number of characters by the number of bits per character.

So, for 500 characters stored using 8 bits per character:

1. 500 characters x 8 bits per character = 4,000 bits

The computer would use 4,000 bits to store an email that is 500 characters long. It's also useful to remember that 1 byte is equal to 8 bits, so this email would be 500 bytes in size. If we want to convert this to kilobytes (KB), we would divide by 1024 (since 1 KB is equal to 1024 bytes).

500 bytes / 1024 ≈ 0.488 KB

Therefore, a 500 character email would take up almost half a kilobyte of storage space when each character is encoded using 8 bits.

Answer 2

If an email message has 500 characters, computer would use 7 bits to store that email.

Step-by-step explanation:

The basic ASCII set uses 7 bits for each character. This gives each character a total of 128 unique symbols. But the extended ASCII character set uses 8 bits. Because of this, there is an additional 128 characters.

The extra character that is present in the 8 bits extended ASCII character has characters from foreign languages and special symbols and characters which can be used to draw images and pictures.