How many bits are in a byte?

• A. 4 bits
• B. 8 bits
• C. 16 bits
• D. 32 bits

Answer: (B)

A byte is eight bits. This is the standard size used by modern computers to store a single character in many encodings, giving 2^8 = 256 possible values. That capacity is enough for common characters in ASCII and UTF-8. If you had four bits, you’d only have 16 values (a nibble); sixteen bits would be two bytes, and thirty-two bits would be four bytes. So the best answer is eight bits.