in the process of iterating through the listif the search term is greater than the current itemthen there is no need to continue with the search when the search operation starts and the first element is compared with ( )no match is made but because there are more elements in the list the search operation moves on to examine the next element more compelling reason to move on is that we know the search item may match any of the elements greater than after the th comparisonwe come to the conclusion that the search termcan not be found in any position above where is located in other wordsif the current item is greater than the search termthen it means there is no need to further search the list def search(ordered_listterm)ordered_list_size len(ordered_listfor in range(ordered_list_size)if term =ordered_list[ ]return elif ordered_list[itermreturn none return none the if statement now caters for this check the elif portion tests the condition where ordered_list[iterm the method returns none if the comparison evaluates to true the last line in the method returns none because the loop may go through the list and still not find any element matching the search term