Continents Loop starting with "A"

On the task to only show continents that begin with the letter "A", I'm missing the WHY this works. We are asking 'if continent[0] == "A":, how is that not throwing an error since the first item in our list doesn't truly = A, it's equaling 'Asia'. Is it because the for is only looking at that first letter and then as soon as it's hitting 'A' it's printing that string in the list?

My second question is regarding the index. With 'if continent[0] == "A": are we actually identifying the first letter or are we identifying the first list item? For example, what if I wanted to print continents ENDING with the letter 'A', does that become continents[-1]?

Thanks!

continents = [
    'Asia',
    'South America',
    'North America',
    'Africa',
    'Europe',
    'Antarctica',
    'Australia',
]
# Your code here
for continent in continents:
    if continent[0] == 'A':
        print("* " + continent)