Answer from cs61c-am (Michael Moeng 16464697) for Question 2
I do not recall reading about "subnormals," but for floating points, which are stored as 1.xxxx * 2^yyyy
a non-normal floating point would be of the format zzz.xxxx *2^yyyy or 0.00xxx * 2^yyyyy
The convention for storing floating points does not account for non-normalized numbers and would return an incorrect number.