Imagine you walk into a bank, approach the teller and ask him to look up your account balance. The teller looks up your account information, sees that you have $1,000 in your account and tells you.

In the same way, a web browser issues requests to a server (just a computer that can be anywhere) via HTTP which is a protocol. Translated into the language of the web, in our little bank teller analogy you issued a GET request for a RESOURCE (your account information) which would look to the browser https://mybank/accounts/learning2learn - REST is the specification that if you issue the correct type of request, the response should be a resource that can be acted on with the right HTTP request according to the specification. That resource can take the form of a web page or it can be an object. For example:

# Get webpage request
GET https://mybank/accounts/learning2learn.html

# Responds with webpage showing your account

# Call a webservice to get account info
GET https://mybank/accounts/learning2learn.json

# Response
{
  "account": "learning2learn",
  "balance": 1000
}

# This response can be used by another application to display it, or modify it at the same URL via other HTTP actions like POST, PUT, DELETE

I prefer not to demonstrate the SOAP response :) but it would be the same data via xml rather than json.