If a file consisting of 50,000 characters takes 40 seconds to send, then thedata rate is .

To find the data rate, we should first consider the total amount of data that is being transmitted, and then divide that by the time it takes to transmit that data. Given the data, we have:

– (50,000) characters to be sent

– It takes (40) seconds to send these characters

Data rates are typically measured in bits per second (bps). Assuming that each character is encoded using 8 bits (1 byte per character, which is common, although actual encoding schemes can vary), we can convert the number of characters to bits:

[50,000 , text{characters} times 8 , text{bits/character} = 400,000 , text{bits}]

Now, to find the data rate, we divide the total number of bits by the time in seconds:

[frac{400,000 , text{bits}}{40 , text{seconds}} = 10,000 , text{bits per second (bps)}]

Therefore, the data rate is (10,000) bps, or (10) kbps (kilobits per second).