Lesson 1 of 6
Bits, Bytes and Beyond
The ladder of data: bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte — and what each one can actually hold.
🟢 Beginner 40 XP
Learn it
All digital information — photos, games, messages, AI models — is stored as bits: tiny switches that are either 0 or 1.
8 bits make 1 byte. One byte can hold a single letter. The letter 'A' is one byte.
Units climb in steps of roughly 1,000: 1 kilobyte (KB) ≈ 1,000 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) ≈ 1,000 KB, 1 gigabyte (GB) ≈ 1,000 MB, 1 terabyte (TB) ≈ 1,000 GB.
Rough anchors: a text message ≈ 0.1 KB, a photo ≈ 3–5 MB, a song ≈ 4 MB, an HD movie ≈ 4 GB, a big video game ≈ 100 GB.
Key terms
- Bit
- A single 0 or 1 — the smallest unit of data.
- Byte
- 8 bits; stores one character of text.
- Kilobyte / Megabyte / Gigabyte / Terabyte
- Each step is ~1,000× bigger than the last.
- Storage vs RAM
- Storage keeps files permanently; RAM is temporary working memory.
Try it
Put these in order from SMALLEST to LARGEST:
- 1A phone's whole storage (~256 GB)
- 2A data centre (~exabytes)
- 3A song (~4 MB)
- 4A big video game (~100 GB)
- 5A text message (~0.1 KB)
- 6An HD movie (~4 GB)
Quiz time
Question 1 of 3Score 0