Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

How does VPC relate to EC2 in AWS?

How to explain to a complete beginner about the relationship between EC2 and VPC? I’ve recently encountered this problem when viewing a online Udemy course. It has an episode instructing the viewers to set up a VPC. It doesn’t explain when to use such a VPC when you can simply launch a EC2 and use the instance directly.

Is VPC a virtual box that you can put stuff like EC2 inside it?