1. Use the compression utility on your computer to compress different files. Study the effect of the original file size and file type on the ratio of compressed file size to original file size.
2. Take a few paragraphs of text from a popular magazine and compress them by removing all words that are not essential for comprehension. For example, in the sentence "This is the dog that belongs to my friend," we can remove the words is, the, that, and to and still convey the same meaning.
Let the ratio of the words removed to the total number of words in the original text be the measure of redundancy in the text. Repeat the experiment using paragraphs from a technical journal. Can you make any quantitative statements about the redundancy in the text obtained from different sources?