You should know the definitions: quark, lepton, hadron, baryon, meson, strange and charmed particles, intermediary particle, antiparticle, the various quark flavors, strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, color charge, gluons, electrons, neutrinos, muons, pions, etc.
You should know how quarks fit together to form baryons and mesons, so as to make colorless particles.
You should know the various conservation laws and when they apply: energy, momentum, charge, color charge, lepton number, quark number; always: quark flavors; strong and electromagnetic interactions only.
Strong forces are transmitted by the emission and absorption of gluons by quarks. Gluons are massless, but can themselves carry color charge. The coupling constant at low energies is of order unity. You should know how color charges of various types combine to form colorless particles. Only colorless particles are directly observable.
Weak forces are transmitted by massive (of order 80-90 GeV) intermediary particles called W+, W-, and Z0. The weak coupling constant is of order 0.05 at low energies. The apparent weakness of the weak force comes not from the smallness of the coupling constant, but from the large mass of the intermediary particles. The W and Z particles are emitted and absorbed by both quarks and leptons.
Electromagnetic forces are transmitted by massless photons. The coupling constant at low energies is 1/137. Photons interact only with particles carrying electric charge.
The basic interaction is the emission or absorption of an intermediary particle by a quark or a lepton. (Gluons can emit or absorb other gluons as well, but we will not be concerned with this case.) Interactions occur freely as long as appropriate conservation laws are not violated.
The weak and electromagnetic forces are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The theory describing both is called electroweak theory. The theory of the strong interaction is called quantum chromodynamics, due to the fact that it deals with color charge. At very high momentum transfers (of order 10^17 GeV), it is hypothesized that strong, weak, and electromagnetic coupling constants are all equal.