Big data refers to the enormous amounts of data being collected from people's online activities every day. This data is stored in large data centers that contain shelves of high-capacity storage drives to house people's data from around the world in a temperature-controlled environment. Hadoop and MapReduce are key applications used to analyze this big data. Hadoop uses a master-slave setup to distribute data across nodes for storage, while MapReduce uses mappers to break data into chunks and reducers to process the mapper output and generate new results. Together, these tools help analyze the vast amounts of collected data to provide useful insights.