In layman's terms, can anyone explain to me how miners generate Bitcoins and process transactions at the same time?

Question

I don't grasp how to the activities are tied together.

Answer 1

miners are like accountants that do accounting for a business. they run the software that does the maths to "verify" transactions are valid. these accountants (miners) are rewarded for their time / effort in creating new ledger pages (blocks in the blockchain), which they in turn need to verify transactions