ZIP File

A 'ZIP' file is a file that's been compressed, in order to take up less storage space on your device. ZIP files can be transferred to other computers more quickly than uncompressed files.
Similarly, it is easier to share a group of files by combining several files into a single zipped folder.
As the data has been compressed, ZIP files contain information in a highly encoded form, which is not directly usable by other applications. In order to retrieve the files, you must extract the compressed files using a ZIP file opener, which will give you exact copies of the original ones in their original format.