I suggest you go through Tuple article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233200.aspx
A couple of exceptions that might shed some light on the problem:
Function fst is used to access the first element of the tuple:
(1, 2) |> fst // returns 1
Function snd is used to access the second element
(1, 2) |> snd // returns 2
In order to extract element from wider tuples you can use following syntax:
let _,_,a,_ = (1, 2, 3, 4) // a = 3
To use it in various collections (well lambdas that are passed to collection's functions), let's start with following sequence:
let s = seq {
for i in 1..3 do yield i,-i
}
We end up with
seq<int * int> = seq [(1, -1); (2, -2); (3, -3)]
Let's say we want to extract only the first element (note the arguments of the lambda):
s |> Seq.map (fun (a, b) -> a)
Or even shorter:
s |> Seq.map fst
And lets finally go back to your question.
s |> Seq.nth 1 |> fst