I don't comprehend the syntax ' [ ' + questions + '] and how that produced the number 3 from var questions = 3

Hey Seth,

In Javascript, the + symbol can be used as math, or for what's called "concatenation", which is just mashing strings (or text) together. In this example,

'[' + questions + '...]'

turns into "[3...]". Don't let the square brackets throw you off! They're just text in this case.

Here's how you might use it if you were coding a game that reported the users score:

var score = 10000;

alert('Good job! You scored ' + score + ' points!!!');

This would display an alert with the text "Good job! You scored 1000 points!!!"

Make sense?

Hi Seth!

By these lines in the beginning of your code

var questions = 3;

you are adding the value 3 to your here defined variable questions. The value of questions is now 3 for the following usage of the variable questions.

The syntax:

' [ ' + questions + '...] '

is basically forming a string that is supposed to be displayed as a term like this: [3 ...] because the current value of the variable questions is 3 according to the first variable declaration above :) Since the value 3 is assigned to the variable questions without quotation marks ('' or "") around it, the value 3 will be treated as a an integer data type. JavaScript treats the 3 as a true number so to say, that can be calculated with. If you put quotation marks around the 3, like so: var questions = "3";

JavaScript would interpret this as a string and you could not do any Maths with it. You'd have to parseInt the variable first.

Hope this clearifies it for you :)

I had the same issue and had to play with it to get it, would have been a lot easier understanding without the square brackets throwing me off. So I wrote it like this:

var questions = 3;
var questionsLeft = '. There are ' + questions + ' questions left';
var adjective = prompt('Please type an adjective' + questionsLeft);
questions -= 1;

Hope this helps, Jim

Thank you and yes it does :)