Question 1: Explain what a character set is and why it is important in computer systems.

Answer: A character set is a collection of characters that a computer can recognize and display. It is important because it ensures that text is correctly represented and understood across different systems.

Question 2: Name two common character sets used in computing and describe one key difference between them.

Answer: ASCII and Unicode are two common character sets. ASCII uses 7 bits to represent characters, supporting 128 characters, while Unicode uses up to 32 bits to support a vastly larger set of characters from many languages.

Question 3: Convert the letter 'A' to its ASCII binary representation.

Answer: The letter 'A' in ASCII is 65. Its binary representation is 01000001.

Question 4: Convert the binary number 01100001 to its corresponding character in ASCII.

Answer: The binary 01100001 represents the lowercase letter 'a'.

Question 5: Describe how Unicode improves upon ASCII for representing characters from different languages.

Answer: Unicode supports a much larger set of characters, including symbols, emojis, and characters from many languages worldwide, using up to 32 bits, whereas ASCII is limited to 128 characters with 7 bits.

Question 6: Complete the following truth table for a binary encoder that encodes the characters 'A' and 'B'. The inputs are the characters, and the outputs are their binary codes: | Character | Binary Code | |------------|--------------| | A | 01000001 | | B | ? |

Answer: The binary code for 'B' is 01000010.

Question 7: Draw a logic circuit that takes a binary input representing a character and outputs '1' if the character is 'A' or 'B', and '0' otherwise. You may use AND, OR, and NOT gates.

Answer: A correct sketch would include two input lines for the binary bits, logic gates combining these inputs with OR gates to match 'A' (01000001) and 'B' (01000010), and an output that is '1' if the input matches either code, '0' otherwise.

Question 8: Explain the difference between fixed-length and variable-length character encoding with examples.

Answer: Fixed-length encoding assigns the same number of bits to each character, such as ASCII with 7 bits per character. Variable-length encoding assigns different numbers of bits depending on the character, such as UTF-8, which uses 1 to 4 bytes for different characters.

Question 9: Sketch a table to show the binary representation of the characters 'C', 'D', and 'E' in ASCII.

Answer: The table should show: 'C' as 01000011, 'D' as 01000100, and 'E' as 01000101.

Question 10: What is the main advantage of using Unicode over ASCII?

Answer: Unicode can represent a much wider range of characters from many different languages and symbol sets, making it more versatile for global communication.

Question 11: Describe a scenario where character encoding issues might cause problems in a computer system.

Answer: If a system uses ASCII but receives text containing characters from other languages, such as accented letters or symbols, these characters may not display correctly, leading to data corruption or misinterpretation.