A question about the Llama exercises

[Telemachus Odysseos]

Maybe a better title is "A question about the comments on one of the answers
to an exercise." Anyhow, this seems like a reasonable place to ask. I just
finished doing the exercises for chapter 4 in the Llama book (on
subroutines) and for question 3, I produced this for a subroutine to collect
numbers above an average:

sub above_average {
    my $average = &average(@_);
    my @above_average;
    foreach (@_) {
        if ($_ > $average) {
            push @above_average, $_;
        }
    }
    return @above_average;
}

In the answer the foreach block has $element in place of $_, and the text
specifically asks, "Why is the control variable named $element instead of
using Perl's favorite default, $_?"  So, I'm stumped - Why should it be
$element instead of $_? My version appears to work well (I even tested with
other values for the number groups), but maybe there is some potential
breakage I'm not seeing.

Thanks in advance, Telemachus