A computer program is a bit like a combination of a cookbook and a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It has a sequence of simple instructions (1. crack an egg, 2. put it into a bowl), and also can jump around (if the person wants sunny side up eggs, go to page 5).
A CPU _core_ is like a cook. The cook can only do one instruction at a time. A thread is like a little bookmark that tells you where you are in the book. You can use this to allow a single cook to work on multiple dishes, jumping between bookmarks in several recipes (_multitasking_) or to allow multiple cooks to work on different parts of a complex recipe (_multiprocessing_).
CPUs like in your computer have several cores, but CPUs in simpler devices might only have one core.
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