The B and its decays

In order to paint a unified picture of the experimental status of B decay, I have organized this talk along the following lines. In section 2 I give a brief description of the Υ system and present the first evidence for the fifth and sixth Υ resonances. The discussion on B decay commences in section 3 with a description of the spectator model and color separation of hadronic final states. These ideas are carried forward to section 4 in the discussion of inclusive properties of B decays. Topics include the semileptonic branching fraction, charged and neutral particle multiplicities, and kaon and baryon yields. Because of the recent progress in measuring exclusive B decay modes, I devote a substantial amount of space to this issue in section 5. I return to the spectator model in section 6 in order to discuss an important prediction of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - namely color mixing suppression - and its experimental verification in B → /PSI/ + X decays. Finally in section 7 I show how the branching fractions for two body decay modes of the B can be calculated. Some of these decay modes turn out to have surprisingly large rates