Ruby on Rails

Hello there,

I am currently going through the Ruby course in Codeacademy and we are going over histograms. There is a particular exercise (5/8 of Data Structures, Meet Iteration) that is giving me trouble. I do not understand the line of code that is in bold below. I've gone through the exercise description a few times and looked around on the forums, but I don't understand what that line is doing. I was hoping someone could explain it to me in their own words - maybe that'll help?

puts "Text please: "

text = gets.chomp

words = text.split(" ")

frequencies = Hash.new(0)

frequencies = frequencies.sort_by {|a, b| b }

frequencies.reverse!

frequencies.each { |word, frequency| puts word + " " + frequency.to_s }