Units of Information

Lesson

Unit	Symbol	Number of bytes
Kilobyte	KB	103 (1000)
Megabyte	MB	106 (1 million)
Gigabyte	GB	109 (1 billion)
Terabyte	TB	1012 (1 trillion)

A bit is the fundamental unit of binary numbers. A bit is a binary digit that can be either 0 or 1.

1 byte = 8 bits

1 nibble = 4 bits

Learning Videos

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Click for video - The units of data storage

Questions

1. State the number of bits in one byte.

   
   

   8 bits

2. State the number of bits in one nibble.

   
   

   4 bits

3. How many bytes are there in a megabyte?

   
   

   1000 bytes in a kB. 1000 KB in a MB. 1000 x 1000 = 1 000 000 bytes in a MB / 1 million.

4. A photographer takes up to 2000 photographs per week. Each photograph requires 5 MB of storage on the camera's memory card. Select the camera memory card with the smallest capacity that can store 2000 photographs.

   a) 4GB

   b) 8GB

   c) 16GB

   d) 32GB

   
   

   2000 x 5MB = 10 000 MB = 10 GB

   c) 16GB

5. The number of bits in 2 MB.

   
   

   2 000 000 * 8 = 16 000 000 (bits)

   1 mark for MB = 1 000 000, 1 mark for 8 bits in a byte.

6. How many bytes are there in:

   (a) 3 kB?

   (b) 2.5 MB?

   (c) 2 GB?

   (d) 4 kb?

   
   

   a) 3 000

   b) 2 500 000

   c) 2 000 000 000

   d) 4 000/8 = 500 bytes (kb means kilobits, not kilobytes.)

7. How many bytes would be needed to store the number 256?

   
   

   Two bytes would be required to store the number 256.