Help understanding statistics

I just started my summer Scholarly Inquiry class where we read lots and lots of nursing research. After picking up my book and reading my first assigned article, I've quickly come to the conclusion that I probably shouldn't have brain dumped everything I learned in my statistics class. I'm having a hard time understanding everything. I get the overall gist of things from reading the abstracts and conclusion. When it comes to answering the more number oriented questions though, I'm still struggling a bit. I'm not looking for answers exactly, just guidance.

I'm having problems with three questions in particular:

1) The researcher characterizes the r of -.33 as "moderate." Do you agree with this characterization?

2) For the r of -.50, the researcher indicates that "p

3') The researcher reports the values of six correlation coefficients: (r = -.33, p

For the first question, I'm assuming that the further the number is away from 0 the stronger it is. The problem is, I'm not sure about the range. Is it 0 to -1? If so, -.33 still seems small to me. However, later on in the study the r of -.50 is said to be considered strong. Given that, I'd agree that -.33 would be moderate. Is that right? I'm not really sure.

For the second question, I'm pretty sure that p is probability. The .01 is the percentage. So there's less than a 1% chance to have.. wait, what? I think my brain was on the right track, then it just got tired or something. I'm getting confused again.

For the third question, I would think that the (r = -.5, p

I've been googling my little heart out trying to figure this stuff out, but I'm still getting lost and a little frustrated with it. It doesn't help that I'm going to be tested over it tomorrow. I actually think I'll do ok, but I'd still like to actually understand what all these numbers mean. I've got a LOT more articles to read over the next 5 weeks after all. If anybody could help steer me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.