Exercising Python3 ( & Stuck! )

Today I worked on trying to understand the part where I got stuck on, but I think I'll move on with that and ask Mr.Elkner for help. Now I went to the other part of the tutorial and I got stuck aging its basically the same thing of problem as the other one I think but I still dont understand what this code means

a = 23
b = -23
 
if a < 0:
    a = -a
if b < 0:
    b = -b
if a == b:
    print("The absolute values of", a, "and", b, "are equal")
else:
    print("The absolute values of", a, "and", b, "are different")

   that would result to only this:

The absolute values of 23 and 23 are equal