Here is a scenario to understand Restore & Recovery

Sunday 10pm : Database is backed up. and is running fine. 

Monday 11am : Went down / crashed due to some reason.

To bring up the database, we have 2 options:

1. Simple Restore : copying files from backup taken sunday night and open the database. Here, we loose all the changes that are done since sunday night.

2. Restore and Recovery: Copying files from backup taken sunday night and applying all the archivelog and redo log files to bring up the database to the point of failure. Here you dont loose the changes done until monday 11 am.

Restore : copying files from the backup overwriting the existing database files

Recovery: applying the changes to the database till point of failure. these changes are recorded in online redolog and archivelog ( which are the backups of redolog) files.