"the world space bounding area of the collider"
In unity you can get your objects in different coordinate representations, a local system that is independent from its parents and where the object itself is the center of the system and a world system. While the local object system is centered around the object the world system is a fixed system and it describes where exactly the object is in your scene, without the world system you would not be able to know where exactly an object is in your scene as its values describe exactly this.

Object space:

World space:

In your case you get the bounds (in case of a box the minimal and maximal position) the object has in the world system.

"bounds min/max"
bounds.min.x will be the lowest x position of the bounds (of the object) and bounds.max.x will be the highest

Edit: here you can see how bounding volumes are working. Bounding volumes will always include every single vertex around your object, but there are different kinds of bounding boxes, unity uses the axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) one.