A computer processes a phrase such as "hello world" primarily as a string of 1’s and 0’s.
Here's a brief explanation of the other formats:
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As a sequence of rational numbers: This representation is not typically used for textual data. Rational numbers (fractions) are used in different contexts, like numeric computations or representations, but not for text.
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As ASCII text: ASCII is a character encoding standard that represents text in computers. However, ASCII text is itself ultimately stored as binary data (1’s and 0’s).
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As a series of 16-bit characters: While some encodings (like UTF-16) use 16-bit representations, standard ASCII uses 7 or 8 bits per character.
In summary, while "hello world" can be represented in different ways, at the lowest level, it is processed by a computer as a string of 1’s and 0’s.