Science Questions....Mega, Tera, Kilo, Giga?

Question

Okay I recieved this very odd assignmnet. I need to find out what is equal to 1 kilo, 1 megabyte, 1 giga, 1 tera. I got that 1 kilo equals to 2.2 lbs. Also I need to know how many zeros are in each. I know 6 are in mega....RIGHT. Any of these answers will help. This is just for us to know more about computers. It has nothing to do with a grade and I have been looking for this for about 2 hours.

Answer 1

Jesse, the first answerer, is right but there is a difference when we're talking about computer science.

In most technical fields we talk about big numbers in powers of ten, numbers like a million, a billion, a trillion, etc. come out even in powers of ten.

But computers don't count in decimal, they count in binary. So a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes, it is 1024 bytes, which is 2 to the 10th power, a 'round' number in binary.  A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, or 1048756.  It's close enough to a million that we call it that.

Above that, of course, the difference grows even bigger.  If you look at a hard drive that is advertised to be 20 gigabytes, you will see somewhere on the box that what the manufacture means by 20 gigabytes is 2000 megabytes, or 2000 * 1048576.  Which is quite a bit smaller than 2 kilo (1024 * 2) times a megabyte.

A kilo being 2.2 pounds is misleading.  You're talking about a kilogram, which is a thousand grams.  There are 454 grams in a pound, so a kilo is about 2.2 pounds.  That's the -real- world, the decimal world, not the binary world of computers.

Answer 2

1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes

1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes

1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes

1 terabyte =  1000 gigabytes

Edit: what "that guy" says is true, but good luck hearing that from a memory manufacturer :p