The main elements and methods of chiral perturbation theory, the effective
field theory of the Standard Model below the scale of spontaneous chiral
symmetry breaking, are summarized. Applications to the interactions of mesons
and baryons at low energies are reviewed, with special emphasis on developments
of the last three years. Among the topics covered are the strong,
electromagnetic and semileptonic weak interactions of mesons at and beyond
next--to--leading order in the chiral expansion, nonleptonic weak interactions
of mesons, virtual photon corrections and the meson--baryon system. The
discussion is limited to processes at zero temperature, for infinite volume and
with at most one baryon.Comment: 84 pages, Latex, 11 PostScript figures (in separate file) embedded
with epsfig.sty, complete ps file (compressed, uuencoded, 0.6 MB) available
via email on request; to appear in Progr. Part. Nucl. Phys., vol. 3