What is a byte, and how many bits make up a byte?

What is a byte, and how many bits make up a byte?

• A. A byte consists of 16 bits and represents a full word.
• B. A byte consists of 8 bits and is a basic unit of data representing a single character in most encodings.
• C. A byte consists of 4 bits and encodes boolean values.
• D. A byte consists of 32 bits and stores microcode.

Answer: (B)

A byte is the standard unit of data that computers use, and it is made up of 8 bits. Those 8 bits give you 256 possible values, which is enough to represent most characters in common text encodings, like ASCII. In practice, a single character is stored in one byte in ASCII, though in other encodings (like UTF-8) a character can take more than one byte. The other options misstate the size of a byte: 16 bits would be two bytes, not one byte; 4 bits is a nibble, half a byte; and 32 bits is a common word size for some processors, not the size of a byte.

A byte is the standard unit of data that computers use, and it is made up of 8 bits. Those 8 bits give you 256 possible values, which is enough to represent most characters in common text encodings, like ASCII. In practice, a single character is stored in one byte in ASCII, though in other encodings (like UTF-8) a character can take more than one byte.

The other options misstate the size of a byte: 16 bits would be two bytes, not one byte; 4 bits is a nibble, half a byte; and 32 bits is a common word size for some processors, not the size of a byte.