Which of the following represents a series of numbers interpreted as characters?

Hexadecimal is a base-16 number system, which is a different way to represent numerical values, not a standard for interpreting numbers as characters.

Octal is a base-8 number system, another way to represent numerical values, not a character encoding standard.

Binary is a base-2 number system, the fundamental language of computers, but it is a representation of numbers, not directly an interpretation of numbers as characters without an encoding scheme.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is an encoding standard that assigns unique numerical values to letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols, allowing computers to interpret these numbers as readable characters. It uses a 7-bit code to represent 128 characters, forming a foundational text representation in computing.