4.6 Quiz answers

1. Positive integers select elements at specific positions, negative integers drop elements; logical vectors keep elements at positions corresponding to TRUE; character vectors select elements with matching names.

2. [ selects sub-lists: it always returns a list. If you use it with a single positive integer, it returns a list of length one. [[ selects an element within a list. $ is a convenient shorthand: x$y is equivalent to x[["y"]].

3. Use drop = FALSE if you are subsetting a matrix, array, or data frame and you want to preserve the original dimensions. You should almost always use it when subsetting inside a function.

4. If x is a matrix, x[] <- 0 will replace every element with 0, keeping the same number of rows and columns. In contrast, x <- 0 completely replaces the matrix with the value 0.

5. A named character vector can act as a simple lookup table: c(x = 1, y = 2, z = 3)[c("y", "z", "x")]