This is an example of a READ statement. This form of the READ statement is used to get information from the standard input device (normally the keyboard). The asterisk (*) represents list directed input. With this kind of input, the programmer does not specify exactly how the data is spaced out but only the order and the type of each component in the list of data.
Here there is only one item in the list that follows the asterisk, namely an INTEGER variable showing where the input data is to be stored.