Page 112. Connect to the Topic. Part B. TUNE IN

Unit 12

page 112

connect to the topic

part B: tune in

welcome to Tech talk; today we’re talking with data scientist Sonja Chen.

I’d like to start by talking about data; we know that in general data means information but what exactly is digital data?

by digital data, we mean information stored digitally that is stored by computers.

so how do we measure digital data? for example data is measured in bytes but what exactly does that mean?

A byte is a unit of data that is large enough to store one character.

for example one letter of the alphabet such as a B or C.

okay, that’s pretty small.

Right; which is why we usually use larger units to measure data; for example 1 MB is over 1 million bytes or about the amount of information in one medium-sized book.

I see.

and a gigabyte is about 1000 times bigger; 1024 MB to be exact.

Whoa; what are some larger units of measure?

next is a terabyte; so if a megabyte is equal to one book, 1 TB is equal to about the amount of information you’d find in all the books in a large library.

and is that the biggest?

No, no; it keeps going up; multiplied each time by 1024, or two to the 10th power.

so next is a petabyte and exabyte and zettabyte; all the way out to yottabyte, which is well it’s really really big.

okay now that’s a lot of data.