Standard ASCII uses how many bits to represent one character?

The correct answer is B, 7. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In its standard form it is a seven-bit code, so it can represent 2 raised to the power 7, that is 128 different characters: the English capital and small letters, the ten digit symbols, punctuation marks and a set of control codes. In this code the capital letter A is 65, the small letter a is 97 and the digit character 0 is 48. Option A is wrong because six bits would allow only 64 characters, too few for both cases of the alphabet. Option C is wrong because eight bits describe Extended ASCII and EBCDIC, which reach 256 characters. Option D is wrong because sixteen bits describe the older fixed-width form of Unicode, the standard created so that Devanagari and every other script could be represented.