What does this challenge ask me to do, and what is the comment trying to tell me? I don't understand at all. ):

Hi Kim,

You had the general jist of what the task was expecting but aren't quite there so let's break it down, the task firsts asks us to create a members function, then we need to assign out parameters the first been the dict and the second been the list.

So far so good with your code with one problem, the keyword list is an reserved keyword in Python therefore it's bad practice to override it within the function, a better name would be keys since the challenge refers to them as that.

Next what we need to do is count the number of keys that exist within the dict which we can do by iterating over the list and using the in keyword to determine if the key exists or not, if it does we increment count like you're already doing.

The final step which you've also done is return the count so you're good in that regard too, the final code we should end up similar or the same as the below.

def members(items, keys):
  count = 0

  for key in keys:
    if key in items:
      count += 1

  return count

I'm not sure why dictionary and list of keys are separated into two arguments, and I don't know how to check if a key is a member of the dictionary.

The reason they're split up in the challenge is because we are searching for those specified keys within the dict, for example you could use this technique if you're filtering say a users details dict to retrieve only values you want.

P.S. Technically, I can skip the code challenge, since I completed it by adding the line of code

count -= 4

Deincremting the value of count shouldn't have let you pass the challenge as the count would have been less than 0.