All dict1, dict2, and dict3 contain the exactly same key-value pairs as grades. However, dict1 is just a pointer to the

The len function returns the number of items in a dictionary (i.e. the length). The clear method is used to delete all items from a dictionary so we will end up having an empty dictionary.,My daughter used to be an artist. She would spend hours in the TV room, not watching TV, but on the floor surrounded by scraps of paper, beads and string, making collages and jewelry, or copying cartoon characters into notebooks.,She wasn’t allowed TV on school days, but we were lax on weekends. She didn’t watch much TV anyway. She was too busy doing something else. When friends came by, she would show them her art books, page after page.,Of course, the iPod Touch wasn’t like the TV, and she never got bored. It was more like a gateway drug. Not long after getting the iPod Touch, she started pushing for a real phone. She would be starting a new school in September, she argued, and taking a bus for the first time. She couldn’t call me with the SIM-less iPod Touch. The August before she started her new school, we bought her an iPhone SE. It’s been hell ever since.,She loved to sew. With a needle and thread, she would make dresses and hats and shoes for her dolls. Before I got around to buying her fabric, she used construction paper. My brother gave her a small wooden artist manikin one Christmas. She made clothes for that too.,With an iPod Touch, we could control both time and content. Yes, she was young, but we would teach good phone habits and manners early. No more than an hour a day. Never after 7 pm, and she couldn’t sleep with it in her room. No phone at the table, nor on family outings like walks in the nearby woods.,My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14. That’s when Bill Gates said he gave his kids phones, and he knew better than we did about tech. But my daughter was starting to use my iPhone, and I wasn’t controlling her time or restricting content.,At ten, she asked for an iPod Touch. She was desperate to have one. All of her friends had either iPod Touches or iPhones. For months, she had been carrying around a phone she made by stitching yellow and black fabric around cardboard. She made a bee for a logo. She called it her Queen Bee phone.,Bill Gates knew best. We should have waited until she was older. Smartphones aren’t like TVs; they’re like crack. And little by little, our daughter has chipped away at our rules and resolve. Insidious apps have made things worse, as has sloppy parenting.,Dictionaries are mutable so we can update, add or delete items. The syntax for updating or adding an item is the same. If the given key exists in the dictionary, the value of the existing item is updated. Otherwise, a new item (i.e. key-value pair) is created.,We told ourselves she only wanted one because her friends had them. It was a status symbol. We didn’t want her to be like one of those people who are denied TV or candy in childhood, only to become addicts later. She’d grow bored soon enough, just like with the TV. We gave her an iPod Touch that Christmas.,It’s a rainy Saturday. She’s an only child. She wants to talk with her friends. I don’t see any harm in FaceTime. We exclude FaceTime from the hour limit. She wants Roblox. All the kids have it, and it seems harmless enough. She’s building her dream house. I tell myself it’s creative and she can play it with friends. Then there’s TikTok and Instagram. She’s underage, but she says her friends all have these apps. Initially, I refuse, but she wears me down. I let her get private accounts. I tell myself at least she’s learning dance routines and taking photos. Then she wants Snapchat. I cave again.,It is through breath that we process emotion. People who are resistant to how they feel often cannot take deep, easy breaths, or they will try to either distract themselves or fill their bodies up with something that stops the processing (like food, or drink). However, if you learn to breathe fully, and allow what comes up, you can get through it — and no longer have to live with the beast in your belly.,After this short introduction, let’s start on examples to dive deep into dictionaries. The examples will cover the features of dictionaries as well as the functions and methods to operate on them.,Up until now, we have done examples with dictionaries whose values were strings. However, the values in a dictionary can be of any type such as lists, numpy arrays, other dictionaries and so on.