A question for those of you familiar with Bittorrent?

I've used it numerously to download movies, but I have a rather large file on the way this time. Seeing as i've only downloaded 3.8% in 7 hours, i'm going to need to shut down. So the question is, does the file terminate after I shut down my computer and turn it back on? or should I pause the download and then open it back up upon startup? please enlighten me