jquery child selector without parent

Question

I was looking at some code from a tutorial for creating a carousel menu and noticed parent child selectors without the parent. Never seen this before, and confused to what it is

Answer 1

There is a parent(or in this case a scope), notice the this keyword inside the selector, that's relative to the element the plugin is being applied to.

jQuery's selectors allow you to set a scope, and it can be any jQuery element object.

Consider

$(".somediv").myplugin();

And inside the plugin

$("> div", this) 
is actually translated to 
$("> div", $(".somediv"))

Have a look at one of my questions, the answer explains quite a bit about jQuery's selectors. What is the fastest method for selecting descendant elements in jQuery?