Working out how thick a stack of 80GB of printed A4 papers will be

Question

I been going through some of my math unit workbook for Computer Science and im stuck on a question which is phrased:

"Given that a single page of A4 paper can display 50 rows by 60 columns of 12pt text, each character takes 1 byte of storage and 1 ream (500 sheets) of 80 gsm paper is 5cm thick, how many meters of shelving are required to store 80GB of information that has been printed on a single sided paper?"

the answer is 2863.31 meters but im not sure how the answers is worked out, could anyone spare a a minute to go through the steps with me?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

1. How many bytes per sheet?
2. How many sheets per centimetre?
3. Therefore, how many bytes per centimetre?
4. And how many bytes per metre? Call this number $N$.

Now the answer is just $(80\times 2^{30}/N)$ metres. (This assumes that a gigabyte is defined as $2^{30}$ bytes, which agrees with your stated answer.)