Which of the following best describes ASCII?

ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is indeed a character encoding standard that represents text in computers and other devices that use text. It is primarily used to represent the English alphabet (both uppercase and lowercase letters), digits (0-9), and various punctuation marks and control characters.

The significance of ASCII lies in its ability to standardize text representation, allowing different systems and devices to communicate and process text consistently. Each character is assigned a unique number, typically ranging from 0 to 127 for the standard ASCII set, which means you can easily convert the characters into binary for computer processing.

This standardization is particularly essential in early computing and communication, ensuring that text files and data sent across networks remain interpretable regardless of the device or platform. Understanding ASCII is foundational for those entering the IT field, as it lays the groundwork for more complex encoding systems and data representation formats used today.