A data engineer needs to store data that can be natively used by an API.

Modern APIs (especially RESTful APIs) commonly use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as the default data interchange format because:

It is lightweight, text-based, and human-readable.

It maps naturally to key–value pairs, arrays, and nested structures.

Most programming languages and frameworks provide native JSON parsing for API requests and responses.

Why the others are incorrect:

HTML (A) – is a markup language for structuring web pages, not a primary machine-to-machine data format for APIs.

ZIF (C) – not a standard data exchange format in this context.

CSS (D) – is for styling HTML elements, not for data representation.

Therefore, the appropriate format for storing data that is natively used by an API is JSON (B).

CompTIA Data+ Reference (concept alignment):

DA0-001 Objectives – Data concepts and environments: data formats such as JSON and their use in APIs.

Study sections discussing structured vs semi-structured formats and how APIs typically consume JSON.