How many bits make up the significand portion of a single precision floating point number?

The significand portion of a single precision floating-point number, also known as the mantissa, is composed of 23 bits. This value is derived from the IEEE 754 standard for representing floating-point numbers in binary format. In single precision, the total number of bits used is 32, out of which 1 bit is dedicated to the sign of the number, 8 bits for the exponent, and the remaining 23 bits are allocated to the significand. These 23 bits allow for a wide range of decimal values to be represented with a reasonable level of precision.