079. OCR A Level (H046-H446) SLR13 – 1.4 Floating point binary part 1 – Overview

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About this video

OCR Specification Reference
AS Level 1.4.1g
A Level 1.4.1g

Binary must be able to represent a wide range of numbers, not just positive and negative whole numbers, but numbers with a fractional part such as 7.25. In this video we show you how this is achieved with a concept called floating point representation.

Key question:

- How does a computer store fractions (real numbers)?

00:00 Floating-point binary - An overview
00:10 Intro
00:15 Recap - Storing binary integers
00:46 Representing fractional numbers using fixed point binary
03:47 Representing fractional numbers using floating point binary
04:21 Examples
06:07 The mantissa and the exponent
06:47 Example 1
08:46 Example 2
09:29 Example 3
10:47 Key question
10:58 Outro

Last updated: 01.07.26

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• SLR 13 – Data types