Step 1: SOP means Sum of Products. Each product term ANDs the literals together, then all product terms are ORed to form the sum.
Step 2: In hardware this is a two-level circuit: a layer of AND gates whose outputs feed a final OR gate. So SOP gives AND gates followed by OR gates.
Step 3: The other options are wrong: both SOP and POS have canonical forms, SOP uses minterms (POS uses maxterms), and neither form is always simpler than the other.