Already in antiquity, Greek philosophers asked themselves: What is matter made of? How many times can an object be divided? Are the elementary building blocks, originally called A-toms, indivisible? Today we know that the following building blocks of matter exist, which we believe are elementary: the three charged leptons, the three neutrinos, the six quarks, and their respective antiparticles. These particles all interact with each other via the electromagnetic, the weak, and the strong force through the exchange of so-called gauge bosons. There are twelve known gauge bosons: the photon (electromagnetism), the W boson, and the Z boson (weak interaction), as well as eight gluons (strong interaction). This group of particles is supplemented by the Higgs boson, which is responsible for the masses of all elementary particles. Together these ingredients constitute the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. The name may seem banal, but it is the best and most precise theory of Nature at present. It describes all phenomena from the hydrogen atom at an energy of 10 electron volts to the collisions at the LHC at 10 to the power of 13 electron volts. This chapter provides an introduction to the basic concepts of the Standard Model, in particular the electromagnetic and weak interactions, and covers exciting topics such as symmetry breaking, parity violation and neutrino oscillations.