How many bits at a minimum are needed to store 100 letters and symbols?

To determine the minimum number of bits needed to store 100 letters and symbols, we first need to consider the total number of unique characters. Assuming we use the standard ASCII set, which includes 128 characters (letters, digits, and symbols), we can represent each character with 7 bits. Therefore, to store 100 characters, we would need a minimum of 700 bits (100 characters × 7 bits per character). However, if a larger character set like UTF-8 is used, it may require more bits for some characters.