Computer Science · A1.2 Data Representation and Computer Logic

A1.2.2 — How Binary Stores Data: Numbers, Text, Images, Audio and Video

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IB DP Computer Science — A1 Computer fundamentals — Data representation and computer logic | SL | A1.2.2

📋 What You Will Learn

  • Explain the fundamentals of binary encoding and why computers use two states
  • Describe how integers and characters/strings are stored as bit patterns (ASCII, Unicode)
  • Describe how images are stored as pixels with a resolution and colour depth
  • Describe how audio is stored through sampling, and video as frames plus audio
  • Explain the impact of binary encoding on storage size and on data retrieval
  • Calculate the storage needed for a given image or audio clip

💡 Why This Matters A light switch is unmistakably on or off — never "slightly on". Computers are built from billions of such two-state switches, so everything they store — a mark out of 7, the letter A, one orange pixel, a millisecond of a song — must first be turned into patterns of 0s and 1s. What differs is only the encoding rule used to

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