Year 8 – Representations: from clay to silicon Learner worksheet
Lesson 5 – Large quantities
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Bits and bytes
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:
does this file contain?
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
Character Number of bits Number of bytes ▿
Representation
@ 01000000 8
11000010
£ 10100011
16
11100010
⁂ 10000001 24
10000010
11110000
10011101
𝄞 10000100
32
10011110
Page 1 Last updated: 09-09-19
Year 8 – Representations: from clay to silicon 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:
a sequence of 8 bits.
How many bytes are required for
one individual character in the
image?
In this image, there are 3 lines, with Total number of characters in the image:
20 characters in each line.
This includes spaces and the special
characters that move to the next line.
How many characters are in the
image in total?
How many bits are required for Bits for the entire image:
representing the entire image?
How many bytes are required for Bytes for the entire image:
representing the entire image?
This resource is available online at ncce.io/rep1-5-a2-w. Resources are updated regularly — please check
that you are using the latest version.
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