"Pinging ask-leo.com [72.3.133.152]" - Ping onlypings IP addresses so the first thing it did when I asked it to ping"ask-leo.com" is it looked up the corresponding IP address. This isperhaps one of the quickest ways I know of to determine the IP addressassociated with a domain. Also, if this look-up fails, you'll know thatthere's a typo in the domain name, or the domain name look-up (DNS) isfailing for some reason.

"Reply from 72.3.133.152:" - this tells you thatthe remote server at that IP address replied, obviously. What thatmeans, though, is that the entire route across the internet, from yourmachine through routers and switches and networking equipment andwhatever else, worked. As did the return path carrying the server'sreply. If this fails, ("timed out") then something along the connectionbetween you and the server might be broken, the server might be offline, or the server might not even exist. It's also possible that theserver is explicitly configured not to respond to ping requests.

"time=69ms" - this is the round trip time; the timebetween sending the "are you there?" and receiving the "yes I am!". Inthis case, 69 milliseconds. Since the ping is repeated several timesyou can see that this time is fairly consistent, which is good. Thetime will vary depending on many factors including how close you are tothe remote server, how many routers and other networking equipment arein between you and that server, and more. In the example above, theping was from me in the Seattle area to the Ask Leo! server housed inTexas. A quick test of a ping to a server in Japan resulted in timestwice as long.

"Sent = 4, Received = 4" - one of the things thatTCP/IP is designed to deal with is packet loss. Ideally, every packetyou send should get to where it's going, but for various reasons thatdoesn't always happen. As long as the packets can get there after aretry or two, in normal usage you'd never notice. Ping sends multiplepackets and reports specifically on the success rate, so that you cansee if a particular connection is prone to packet loss.

"Approximate round trip times" - while on averagethe same kind of packet sent to the same destination should takeroughly the same amount of time, that's also not always the case.Sometimes for reasons as diverse as the equipment and paths that thepackets take, some take longer than others. Ping reports thesestatistics so that you can see if a particular connection is prone tothis type of problem.