what is this question asking me to do?

Okay, so what he wants is for you to check the first character of the last name and figure out if they go to Line 1 (starts with A through M) or line 2 (letters N-Z)

The second part of the task might help a bit:

chars can be compared using the > and < symbols. For instance 'B' > 'A' and 'R' < 'Z'

So you've got the idea, where you do lastName.charAt(0) because you're snagging the first character of the last name. Now you just have to think about what you want to compare that character to.

Remember that B is greater than A, so A is less than B (obv right?)

So how I thought about it was "If the cutoff is M, should I just check the character to see if it's less than N?"

Then just set up the if statement to check if their last name starts with a character less than N, set line to 1, else set it to 2.

This works because chars are comparable, so they can use comparison operators like < > == just fine. It's just remembering that A is "smallest" and Z is "greatest" and you're all set.

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant {

  public int getLineFor(String lastName) {
    /* If the last name is between A thru M send them to line 1
       Otherwise send them to line 2 */
    int line = 0;

    if (lastName.charAt(0) < 'N') {
      line = 1;
    } else {
      line = 2;
    }

    return line;
  }
}