Understanding the purpose of some assembly statements

Question

I am trying to understand some assembly code and managed to finish most of it except a few lines. I am able to understand most of what is happening inside but am not able to

Answer 1

Not sure why the compiler does all this stuff, but here's what I can decipher:

 8048394:8d 4c 24 04          lea    0x4(%esp),%ecx              ; ecx := esp+4
 8048398:83 e4 f0             and    $0xfffffff0,%esp            ; align the stack to 16 bytes
 804839b:ff 71 fc             pushl  -0x4(%ecx)                  ; push [ecx-4] ([esp])
 80483a1:51                   push   %ecx                        ; push ecx
 80483a2:83 ec 4c             sub    $0x4c,%esp                  ; allocate 19 dwords on stack
 80483c1:83 c4 10             add    $0x10,%esp                  ; deallocate 4 dwords from stack
 80483c4:59                   pop    %ecx                        ; restore ecx
 80483c5:5d                   pop    %ebp                        ; and ebp
 80483c6:8d 61 fc             lea    -0x4(%ecx),%esp             ; esp := [ecx-4]