Passing of querystrings

Hi, I am new to php and trying to learn it for some university work. The problem I am having is this: I have read on a webmonkey tutorial that when you call a php file and name-value querystrings are automatically created into variables in your script. I have a example url : http://localhost/output2.php?id=1 Which I hoped would make a variable, $id, and set the value to 1. However it doesnt work, the variable is not created. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have Appache 2.0.48, MySQL 4.0.17, and PHP 4.3.4 Many Thanks Ryan Francis