Accessability/Visability Private

This is part of a assignment, I was instructed to make a variable in a class 'A' private. Class 'B' extends class 'A' and class B uses the variable in class A that I declared private. Now I am going to receive an error message until I deal with the usage of this variable.

How can a class B object get access to this private variable of class A without changing the accessibility/visibility of the variable?

Here is a snippet of the code, the variable is "text"

Code :

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tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(text, " ");

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Are you allowed to modify class A? If so, I would add what is known as a "getter" method. In essense, it simply returns the value of the variable you want.

Code :

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public class A
{
     private int num;
     // the getter method
     public int getNum()
     {
          return this.num;
     }
}

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