Question

Which of the following statements about ASCII and Unicode is correct?

• A. ASCII uses 16 bits per character, while Unicode uses only 7 bits.
• B. Unicode is backward compatible with ASCII and includes all ASCII characters in its encoding.
• C. Unicode and ASCII are completely different and share no common characters.
• D. ASCII can represent more characters than Unicode because it uses fewer bits per character.

Hint:

Unicode is designed to be backward compatible with ASCII, meaning the first 128 Unicode characters are identical to ASCII characters.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

Step 1: Understand ASCII and Unicode.
- ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) uses 7 bits to represent characters, but it is typically stored in 8 bits. It can represent 128 characters, including English alphabets, digits, and some special symbols.
- Unicode is a character encoding standard that can represent a much larger range of characters, including characters from all languages and symbols, and it is backward compatible with ASCII. Unicode uses more than 7 bits (typically 16 bits or more) to represent a much larger set of characters.

Step 2: Analyze the options.
- (a) Incorrect: ASCII uses 7 bits, not 16. Unicode uses more than 7 bits but is not limited to 16 bits.
- (b) Correct: Unicode includes all ASCII characters in its encoding and is backward compatible with ASCII.
- (c) Incorrect: Unicode and ASCII share common characters, especially in the lower 128-character set.
- (d) Incorrect: ASCII represents fewer characters than Unicode, not more.

Step 3: Conclusion.
The correct answer is (b).