what are torrents?

You can download stuff with it. You simply search for anything you want on a torrent site and you download the .torrent file, which you open with a torrent program (I recommend uTorrent - http://www.utorrent.com/). The speed of your download depends mostly on the amount of seeders (uploaders). Downloaders are called leechers. A good torrent site is http://www.torrentz.com/... It searches on several torrent sites, so you will find the most results there.

Meta-files used for the bittorrent filesharing protocol, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

I have not heard of torrents before and don't know what they are. But, I'll look them up and thanks for the information.

.torrent files are used in p2p networking. for detailed information please follow the link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent