When a cursor name is explicitly assigned to a SELECT statement through CURSOR statement, it is called an explicit cursor. Explicit cursors are generally used to work with more than one row within PL/SQL. It has got the following attributes:
1. Defining the Cursor
2. Opening the Cursor
3. Fetching rows(values) from Cursor (one at a time)
4. Closing the Cursor

SELECT into statement allows you to retrives the query result in user defined variables. But the limitation here is that the query must return a single row. Its a best practice to handle NO_DATA_FOUND and TOO_MANY_ROWS exception when dealing with "SELECT INTO" statement.