American Standard Code for Information Interchange; the universally recognized raw text format that any computer can understand.

• A. Binary
• B. Decode
• C. ASCII
• D. Encode

Answer: (C)

Understanding how computers store and read text relies on a standard that assigns a specific number to each character. That standard is ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is the universally recognized text encoding used to represent basic Latin letters, digits, punctuation, and some control commands as numeric codes. Because each character has a defined numeric value, computers can store text as binary and transfer it between systems consistently. ASCII originally used seven bits per character, giving 128 symbols, and later extended to eight bits for 256 symbols, which still preserves the original set. The other terms describe actions or a general form of data—the word binary refers to the 0s and 1s digital level, while encode and decode are processes you perform on data rather than a specific text format. So ASCII is the standard best fit for the description.