I definitely had some frustrating moments with this first exercise! It turns out that they mostly stemmed from the same kind of variable mistakes I was making in the last assignment, not from the new concept of conditionals. At first, I had:

if hours <= 40 :
  pay = int(hours) * float(rate)

Which obviously is missing a variable type assignment for hours. I was also a little slow to realize that I could use a statement like “pay = int(hours) * float(rate)” inside a conditional, since the chapter only used “print” statements. I also had to remember good ol’ PEMDAS to get the second calculation working.

Exercise 1:

The second exercise required the use of nested conditionals. In this case, you needed to use a nested pair of “try/except.” At first, I had this:

hours = input('Enter Hours:')
int(hours)
rate = input('Enter Rate:')
try:
  if int(hours) <= 40 :
    pay = int(hours) * float(rate)
  elif int(hours) > 40 :
    pay = 40 * float(rate) + (int(hours) - 40) * float(rate) * 1.5
  print('Pay: ' + str(pay))
except:
  print('Error, please enter numeric input')

This worked ok if you entered an invalid input for rate, but you just got one of those ugly errors if you entered an invalid input for hours. Then I realized that I somehow had to first check if the input for “hours” was an integer.

Exercise 2:

Exercise 3 was more tedious than challenging. I realized pretty quickly that I would have to use the logical operator “and”. After that, it was just a matter of entering all of the different conditions for each grade range.

Exercise 3: