I have Mandrake 9.2 dual booting with XP. (my son set Mandrake up for me)
I thought I'd have a go at Mandrake 10.1 Official.
I went to:
< I put in the URL here but since I'm new it won't let me do that >
It's the url to the page on LinuxQuestions.org- Downloading ISO's from LQ ISO - LinuxAnswers

which told me to type in:
QUOTE
It is recommended that you use curl to download the ISO images from LQ ISO.
To use curl, at a shell prompt, cut and paste the URL for the ISO into the curl command as follows:
[LQ@localhost isos]$ curl -C - -O 'url_for_ISO'

Be sure to include the single quotation marks. The '-C -' option allows you to continue the download if it is interrupted (for example, in case you lose the connection). The '-O' (the letter 'O', not a zero) option will save the file with same name as on the server.
ENDQUOTE
So I typed in:
[LQ@localhost isos]$ curl -C - -O 'in between these quotes I put the url for the download from LinuxQuestions.org ISOs'

and I got:

bash: [LQ@localhost: command not found


So - what did I do wrong?

You only need to type in what's after the $, so

thanks for your reply - I must seem rather stupid to you.
But why did the website say
[LQ@localhost isos]$ curl -C - -O 'url_for_ISO'
if I didn't need the first part?
What does the first part mean?

OK, so I typed in
curl -C - -O 'url_for_ISO'
replacing the bit in single quotes with the url (that I can't insert in my post) and I got an error message:
** Resuming transfer from byte position 459663792
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.
Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- 0:00:00 --:--:-- 0
curl: (33) HTTP server doesn't seem to support byte ranges. Cannot resume.

Of course all the formatting dies when I copy and paste it here!
I don't know why it said "Resuming"

Me neither, never used curl in my life

You haven't stated whether you're downloading the CD images or the DVD image but I'll use the DVD as an example here because that's what I'd use. Try typing this in (or copy-pasting if your terminal supports it) and see how that goes, I can't see why it wouldn't work.
I couldn't see anywhere it said to use curl but wget should work fine if not better