Economy Thoughts

When you hear the word economics, what comes to your mind? To me, economics is just the transferring of money from citizen to business. My parents are always talking about the economy, but I don't know what they're talking about, so I want to learn about it. A specific thing in economics that I find extremely confusing is the stock market. I mean what is it? All I know about stocks is that the are money that you put into a business and then you get a certain percentage of the money that they make. I also think that economy is about jobs and how many people get hired/fired every day. I think that America has a pretty large unemployment rate. Here is a picture of the stock markets. Can anyone understand this?