IT GACE Computer Science Practice Test 2026 - Free Computer Science Practice Questions and Study Guide

Using only two options refers to the base-2 numeral system, known as binary. In binary, each digit is a bit that can be 0 or 1, and values are built from powers of two. This fits computing because hardware naturally has two states (for example, on and off), so data is represented and processed as sequences of these two states. Decimal and hexadecimal use more symbols (ten or sixteen), and ASCII is a character-encoding scheme that happens to be stored in binary, but it isn’t defined by having only two symbols.