the if statement is used for conditional executiona testing values and making decisions detailslets you perform an action (another statement or moreif given condition is trueif the condition is falsethen the block is not executed rememberwhen testing equality use =(and not =extending the testingelif allows you to check multiple expressions for truth value and execute block of code as soon as the first one of the conditions evaluates to true (all following elif expressions are ignoredelse is catch-all in case previous condition(snot met