In many cases you'll need to provide an alternative response to the conditional statement. The else statement lets you create consequences when the condition in the if statement is false. The else statement was discussed in Chapter 7 as the way to detect dropped movie clips. In that example, the if statement tested whether a movie clip was dropped on another movie clip; when true, the dropped movie clip disappeared, and when false, the else statement made the dropped movie clip bounce back to its original position. The else statement takes care of any condition that the if statement doesn't cover.
The else statement has to be used in conjunction with the if statement and follows the following syntax: