A rest is not a "pause" or a "break." A rest is a silence with a specific duration, and the music keeps going through it. Every note value has a rest of equal length: a quarter note has a quarter rest, an eighth has an eighth rest, and so on. When you hit a rest in the music, your hands stop — but your counting doesn't.
This is the single biggest leak in beginning drumming. People treat rests as places to relax, lose the beat, and then re-enter on a guess. The fix is simple but unglamorous: say every count out loud, including the ones where you're not playing. Rests don't break time. They are time.
Rests also do important visual work on the page. They tell your eye exactly where each note lands by separating it from what came before. A bar with a stroke on the "&" of 2 looks confusing if you just see a single eighth note floating somewhere; show that there's an 8th rest before it, and now your eye snaps to the right place. The exercises below leave the rests visible so you can study the glyphs — usually we hide them and let the snare line do the talking, but this lesson is about silence as content.