Shadows
Shadows are the dark parts of your photo. The shadows slider brightens or darkens them without touching the rest. Lifting shadows is one of RAW's nicest tricks: you pull detail out of dark corners without brightening the whole image.
Lift the shadows to reveal faces in backlight or detail in a dark foreground. Careful: opening them too far flattens the shadows and brings up noise, especially at higher ISO. RAW gives you far more room than JPEG to recover shadows. Combine with blacks so the very deepest tones keep their depth and the photo doesn't turn grey.
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The presets on this site set these adjustments up for you as a starting point, which you then fine-tune to taste.