Let's take a look at an example of when you could use just these four operators to do something potentially useful. Let's say that you wanted to keep track of certain boolean attributes about something -- for instance, you might have eight cars (!) and want to keep track of which are in use. Let's assign each of the cars a number from 0 to 7.
Since we have eight items, all we really need is a single byte, and we'll use each of its eight bits to indicate whether or not a car is in use. To do this, we'll declare a char called in_use, and set it to zero. (We'll assume that none of the cars are initially "in use".)