The Standard Model and Experiment

We review some basic experiments which established the validity of the Standard Model. They include the discovery of charm as well as the other two heavy quark flavours, that of the intermediate vector bosons W± and Z and of the BEH scalar. We show the successes of the model in the domain of hadron spectroscopy, but also its shortcomings. The rich subject of CP-violation in the hadronic and the leptonic sectors is reviewed, as well as the questions of flavour violating transitions. We end with an overall comparison between theory and experiment and point out the few cases in which some tension persists.