I disagree with Colin when he says "there is no relation between current and voltage" -- their is a direct relation called Ohm's law. However I don't think that's what Colin was trying to say -- what he was trying to say is that having a large voltage doesn't necessarily imply a large current and having a small voltage doesn't necessarily imply a small current. You can have:-- a small voltage and a small current
-- a small voltage and a large current
-- a large voltage and a small current
-- a large voltage and a large currentWhich of these combinations you have depends on the voltage you start out with and also on the resistance of the circuit. You ask for a real-life analogy. We can think of electrons "flowing" through a wire as being similar to water flowing through a pipe as illustrated below:
Some materials (like copper) conduct electrons very easily so we call them conductors. Other materials (like rubber) don't conduct easily, so we call them insulators. Every material, even copper, resists the flow of electricity a little bit -- we call this property resistance. Sometimes we want a component that does conduct, but not too much, In the same way that a narrowing of the pipe will constrict or resist the flow of water, so a "resistor" will resist the flow of electricity as illustrated below:
The relationship between voltage (also known as "electric potential"), current, and resistance is defined by Ohm's law (look it up on Google). I always think of this as V = I x R (voltage = current multiplied by resistance). If you know any two of these values you can work out the third. A useful trick to remember things is called "Ohm's triangle" as illustrated below.
Back to the real world example, suppose you take a 2-liter coke bottle, drink the coke, make markings on the side with an indelible pen, and punch a small hole in the side at the bottom as illustrated below.
Try to think of these markings as indicating 0 volts, 9 volts, and 18 volts. Now suppose that we fill the bottle with water to the 9V line and set things up as illustrated below:
The water will jet out through the small hole for a certain distance 'd'. Suppose you capture the water in a glass over some time 't'. We can think of the height of the water in the bottle as being the voltage, the area of the hole as being the resistance (well, the inverse of the area, because a larger hole equates to a lower resistance) , and the amount of water that passes through the hole each second as being the current.If you fill the bottle to the 18V line and repeat the experiment, you'll see that the amount of water coming out of the hole increases (if everything was "ideal" it would double, but this is a rough-and-ready setup).
If the hole is just a pin-prick, then you will only get a small amount of water flowing through it, even if we fill the bottle to the 18V line. Alternatively, if the hole is 1" in diameter, then we will get a lot of water flowing through it, even if we only fill the bottle to the 4V line.
If we keep the bottle filled to the 9V line and gradually increase the diameter of the hole (thereby lowering the resistance), the amount of water flowing will increase accordingly.I don't think I can explain things any simpler than this.