Question

I have the following query, now how do i display the output in a <p> tag

SELECT COUNT( question_status) AS active_questions
FROM questions_table
WHERE question_status = "Active"

Answer 1

Going back to complete basics:

<?php

$connection = mysql_connect($DB_hostname, $DB_username, $DB_password) or die(mysql_error());
        mysql_select_db($DB_name, $connection);
        $query = mysql_query("
            SELECT COUNT(question_status) AS active_questions
            FROM questions_table
            WHERE question_status = "Active"
        ", $connection) or die(mysql_error());
        echo '<p>';
        while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($query))
        {
            echo $myrow['active_questions'];
        }
        echo '</p>';

This is by no means exacting, it doesn’t use any external (or valuable libraries, such as PDO), but should give you an idea of how to simplistically implement and render a result set.

You should explore/read-up on mysqli/PDO and others for further functionality/utility in time.