how do I assign -12 in base 10 to biased 32 in binary?

Question

Not really sure how to approach this one. I understand how to convert decimal to hex and all that, but what is biased 32?

Answer 1

Biased $32$ is one the ways to encode negative numbers in binary. See here for some of the other ways. Biased $32$ means that you are going to treat $-32_{10}$ as $000000$, $-31_{10}$ as $000001$, $-30_{10}$ as $000010$, etc. Notice that $-31--32 = 1$, which is the unsigned binary number we assign to it. So for $-12$, we need the unsigned binary number for $-12--32 = 20$. So $-12_{10}$ is $010100$.