There are a number of things to note from Figure 2 :
What do we learn from this? First of all, it looks like our basic paradigm - to describe the large scale properties of the Universe, and the formation of structure within it - are in good shape. The prediction from the `straw man' model, standard Cold Dark Matter (sCDM) is shown by the dashed line in Figure 2. The point is that this model, which contains parameters which are all fixed at very round numbers, has the right general character. And it is easy to find models which fit the data much better, by tuning some of those parameters.
What we already know can be split (artificially) into 3 areas: astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics, each of which I will now discuss in turn. For more details refer to the review article by Lawrence et al. (1999) .