Please explain this crossword puzzle answer to me

I know what you mean but I disagree. In my understanding, it’s a violation of cryptic protocol to use a word twice in that way. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to use one meaning of entrance to generate that portion of the answer.

It’s common in cryptics for the word “church” in the clue to yield “ch” in the answer. No further descriptive (e.g. “beginning,” “ending,” etc.) is needed.

Ti
That example was in the how-to-solve introduction to a London Time cryptic paperback. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in use, but I sure remember it.

Modern American puzzles use this same type of wordplay, but with straight answers, and a question mark. So “Swiss flower?” could be the popular Aare.
“Swiss flower” on the other hand should be a real flower, whatever that might be.

You’ll also only see this sort of wordplay a few times per puzzle, in the American style, while cryptics are composed entirely of it. And there’s a bit more structure in cryptic clues, in that the clue generally has two parts, one for the meaning of the answer and one for the orthography of it.

The flip side of this is that a properly-constructed American puzzle will contain no uncrossed squares, while cryptics are full of them (less than half of squares crossed). So both puzzles have their redundancy, but in different forms. That is, if you have to ask “is this answer correct?”, you can always get an answer: In a cryptic, you know the answer is correct because it fits both parts of the clue, while in an American puzzle, you know it’s correct because it fits the words that cross it.