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Spoilers below.

A black hole is basically a region of space that has so much concentrated mass that it creates a strong enough gravitational pull to trap everything nearby, including light without any way for these nearby objects that are in the Schwarzschild radius to escape. The Schwarzschild radius is just the area you have to enter to be sucked in to the black hole. If you do not enter this radius, the gravitational pull does not reach you. Black holes occur when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself. These stars have to be 10 to 15 times the size of our sun and will explode outward in a supernova before collapsing. This collapse creates a point with zero volume and infinite density-which is the ratio between mass and volume. This point is what is known as a singularity. Because not even light can escape this region, we can also receive no information from it. That is why it is called a black hole.

Now to understand more about black holes you have to understand more about gravity. The general relativity definition of gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Massive objects distort spacetime. That means it looks kinda like this (show diagram). I have links to some more science-y pictures below. So a black hole severely distorts spacetime. Black holes also have something called an event horizon. This marks the boundary of the black hole. Once you enter the horizon you are doomed to be sucked in to the black hole. The event horizon moves at very fast speeds, even though it seems still from far away. The event horizon’s velocity is the reason it is easy to get sucked in but impossible to escape.

I have links to articles about black holes below, they go really in depth explanation wise, for an article.

ARticles

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html

Pictures

http://www.astronomynotes.com/evolutn/grwarp.gif