When you start karting the single most important thing to understand is the tires. Since you are depending on these babies you want to able to get the best traction to the kart. Knowing how far to push this traction into a corner takes a lot of practice and should consist of mastering the technique of knowing how to bring the kart back from the edge. Understanding how your kart is behaving can help this process, 2 terms come to mind over steer & under steer. Under steer occurs when the front has less grip than the rear, over steer is the opposite, the rear of the kart has less than the front forcing the kart to slide. Either can actually assist you in certain situations but you want to grasp the technique of letting the kart drift not slide, tire pressures will make an enormous difference in your performance on race day.