ok well the way I understood the question was totally oposite of that... sorry:-) So the point to question 1 in chapter nine is that you can use the contents of a variable as the pattern instead of typing out an actual pattern? so for example:

barneybarneybarney =~ /($what){3}/
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would match the string because the variable contains the contents of the string barneybarneybarney ??? Sorry if I'm being a pain in the neck but I just want to make sure I fully understand this before I move on to chapter 10.