I'll try to explain it better.
It's best to first talk about why you would use a torrent. The reason you do this is normally because the file you are looking to get is a large file - normally a ripped video, an entire album collection of an artist, etc... A torrent allows the user to download pieces of the files you want (that music or that video) from MULTIPLE people. It's called a distributed system. You get different pieces of the file from different people, so if the download you want is big, you will get the file much much faster than if you were downloading it from one source.
An example would be, if you were downloading a file from Microsoft and they went offline (not likely), you wouldn't have a backup to get it, and the speed you would get would be depend on how fast Microsoft could get it to you. On the other hand if you wanted that same file and 5000 people had it, you could get different pieces of that file simultaneously and if one person went offline, it wouldn't matter because you would have 4999 others to continue grabbing pieces from.
With that in mind, the torrent itself is a file (just like a picture, mp3, etc...) however instead of its function being that of containing an image or sound, it's sole purpose is to keep track of the little pieces you have sent/received.
Or the long and short of it - a torrent lets you get big files quickly by downloading pieces of it really fast from other people all across the Internet, who in turn, are also downloading/uploading pieces of it simultaneously... it's like Napster back in the day.