Keeps saying task 1 not passing

Why do you have the last line, states.remove(red)?

It's not needed, you've only been asked to remove the last item in the list. But, even if you were trying to remove "red" from the list you would trigger a NameError with your code as written.

Since you don't need to remove red I would suggest removing that line and seeing if your code passes.

Hope that helps!

the difficulty am having is in the second question which asked me to remove the second item on the list which is the red

Hey Bernard,

The instructions for the second part of the task state:

"OK, one more removal. See that second item in states? It's a list of colors and doesn't belong here. Can you get rid of it for me? Be sure to use .remove() again."

So you need to remove the entire list, but red isn't a key, but rather is just a string inside of the list, so states.remove(red) isn't going to work.

One thing you might consider would be targeting items via their index in the main list. For example, in the states variable -

states = [
    'ACTIVE',                   # string, index 0 states[0]
    ['red', 'green', 'blue'],   # index 1 / states[1]
    'CANCELLED',                # string, index 2 / states[2]
    'FINISHED',                 # string, index 3 / states[3]
    5,                          # int, index 4 / states[4]
]

You could target the last item by targeting the object directly, with states.remove(5), or via its index, with states.remove(states[4]).

Does this help get you closer?

Hi Luke,

The green text items are just comments supporting the explanation.

Index is the items position in the list. For example, the word ACTIVE is first in the list, so its index is 0.

states is just the name of the variable that's been assigned to hold the list. Given the list above, states[0] will return the string ACTIVE, and states[1] will return the list ['red', 'green', 'blue'], etc.

Hope that clears things up.

tanks that realy help