title: Why is 'this' passed while creating an instance of Intent?
body: <p>I am new to android app development.
  I am trying to understand what is intent and its uses.</p>
  
  <p>My question is that while starting another activity, why is 'this' keyword passed as the context parameter for the intent?</p>
  
  <pre><code>Intent foo = new Intent(this, viewContacts.class);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I understand that the any activity extends Context class, but why is it that we are passing the <strong>activity context</strong> and not the <strong>application context</strong>?</p>
  
  <p><strong>My Point-</strong></p>
  
  <p>When another activity starts the current activity will get destroyed but its context will be passed to the other one. Referring to <a href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2009/01/avoiding-memory-leaks.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> article, it says that  </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The most obvious way of avoiding context related memory leak is to avoid escaping the context outside of its own scope.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So aren't we passing the context of current activity to another one where the first one goes out of scope?
  Isn't it an example of memory leak?</p>