This document discusses abstract classes in C++. It defines an abstract class as a class designed to be used as a base class that cannot be instantiated and must contain at least one pure virtual function. It provides an example of how to declare an abstract class with a pure virtual function and how to derive a class from an abstract class, overriding the pure virtual functions. The importance of abstract classes is that they allow common functionality to be defined for derived classes while leaving implementation details to the derived classes.