Is “else if” a single keyword?

Question

I am new to C++. I often see conditional statement like below:

if 
  statement_0;
else if
  statement_1;

Question:

Syntacticall

Answer 1

You can see the scope by using curly braces:

if(X) {
  statement_0;
}
else {
  if(Y) {
    statement_1;
  }  
}

And normally implemented with two distinct keywords, one is if and one is else.