Help with nested $s and quotations in bash / awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Folks - newbie bash coder here and I'd like to get your help to make the code below work. As you can see, I was trying to count the total number of lines with the 3rd value >= 15 in a file and wanted to make the threshold "15" configurable, but apparently the $THRESHOLD value was not populated correctly.

Thanks for your help!

THRESHOLD=15
REPORT_FILE=./report.txt
CMD="awk '{if ($3 >= $THRESHOLD) L++} END {print L}' $REPORT_FILE"
echo Command: $CMD
$CMD
2 
THRESHOLD=15
REPORT_FILE="report.txt"
CMD="awk -v threshold=$THRESHOLD '{if(\$3>=threshold) L++} END {print L}' $REPORT_FILE"
echo "Command: $CMD"
eval "$CMD"
3 
awk -v thr="${THRESHOLD}" '{if ($3 >= thr) L++} END {print L}' $REPORT_FILE
5

Thank you both! That explained why my attempt below did not work!

CMD="awk '{if($3>="+$THRESHOLD+") L++} END {print L}' $REPORT_FILE"