Drupal allows you to define multiple navigation menus for your site. The theme for your site also reserves regions where these menus may be displayed. Typically themes reserve a place for what are called "Primary Links" and "Secondary Links", as well as multiple regions for blocks, which may also contain menus.

In your navigation menu, if you go to "Administer" -> "Content" ("Administer" -> "Content management" -> "Content" in Drupal 5 and later), you'll see a list of recently updated content. You can filter this list by status, content type, and category.

The taxonomy term view displays a teaser list of nodes belonging to a particular term. So if you were running a simple blog site, for instance, you could have a vocabulary called "topic", which would allow your users to browse your posts by topic.

Each taxonomy term is associated with a term ID number. If the site "www.example.com" had a taxonomy term for "cats", with the ID number 1, you could browse a teaser list of posts in the category "cats", with the URL:

http://www.example.com/taxonomy/term/1

The front page of most Drupal sites is a kind of view. 

Let's go back and edit the node we just created. In the "Publishing options" settings there's an option labelled "Promoted to the front page". This does pretty much what you'd expect. Check this box, and a "teaser" of the node will appear on the front page.

A view is simply a list of nodes filtered, sorted, and displayed in a particular way. In Drupal, a personal blog is created by simply listing all the nodes of type "blog" created by a particular user, sorted by node creation date. An event calendar is simply a list of nodes with a date field, perhaps displayed in a flat list sorted by date, or alternatively displayed in a calendar table.