The 4-Week Learning Sprint is open to anyone, with the target audience aged between 20 and 28.

After successfully completing the 4-Week Learning Sprint, yowill need to submit a plan for a sport﹣based project, which yowill work on if selected as an IOC Young Leader.

Requirements for the Applicants

?Yohave successfully completed the 4-Week Learning Sprint.

?Yohave completed your high school studies.

?Yohave at least one year of work experience.

?Yohave strong public speaking skills.

?Yoare self-motivated and committed.

?Yoare passionate about creating positive change in your community.

?Yoare open to being coached and advised by experts and peers (同伴).

?Yoare able to work with people from different backgrounds.

21. In the 4-Week Learning Sprint, participants will ________.

A. create change in their community B. attend a virtual learning programme

C. meet people from different backgrounds D. promote the IOC Young Leaders project

22. If selected as an IOC Young Leader, one will need to ________.

A. complete a reflection task each week B. watch sports on the IOC channel

C. work on a sport-based project D. coach and advise their peers

23. Which is a requirement for the applicants?

A. Spreading the message of sport for good. B. Having at least one-year work experience.

C#FormatImgID_1# Showing great passion for project planning. D. Committing themselves to becoming an expert.

Sitting in the garden for my friend’s birthday. I felt a buzz (振动) in my pocket. My heart raced when I saw the email sender’s name. The email started off: “Dear Mr Green, thank yofor your interest” and “the review process took longer than expected.” It ended with “We are sorry to inform you…”and my vision blurred (模糊). The position—measuring soil quality in the Sahara Desert as part of an undergraduate research programme — had felt like the answer I had spent years looking for.

I had put so much time and emotional energy into applying, and I thought the rejection meant the end of the road for my science career.

So I was shocked when, not long after the email, Professor Mary Devon, who was running the programme, invited me to observe the work being done in her lab. I jumped at the chance, and a few weeks later I was equally shocked—and overjoyed—when she invited me to talk with her about potential projects I could pursue in her lab. What she proposed didn’t seem as exciting as the original project I had applied to, but I was going to give it my all.

I found myself working with a robotics professor on techniques for collecting data from the desert remotely. That project, which I could complete from my sofa instead of in the burning heat of the desert, not only survived the lockdown but worked where traditional methods didn’t. In the end, I had a new scientific interest to pursue.

When I applied to graduate school, I found three programmes promising to allow me to follow my desired research direction. And I applied with the same anxious excitement as before. When I was rejected from one that had seemed like a perfect fit, it was undoubtedly difficult. But this time I had the perspective (视角) to keep it from sending me into panic. It helped that in the end I was accepted into one of the other programmes I was also excited about.

Rather than setting plans in stone, I’ve learned that sometimes I need to take the opportunities that are offered, even if they don’t sound perfect at the time, and make the most of them.

24. How did the author feel upon seeing the email sender’s name?

A. Anxious. B. Angry. C. Surprised. D. Settled.

25. After talking with Professor Devon, the author decided to ________.

A. criticise the review process B. stay longer in the Sahara Desert

C. apply to the original project again D. put his heart and soul into the lab work

26. According to the author, the project with the robotics professor was ________.

A. demanding B. inspiring C. misleading D. amusing

27. What can we learn from this passage?

A. An invitation is a reputation. B. An innovation is a resolution.

C. A rejection can be a redirection. D. A reflection can be a restriction.

In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”.

It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires.

These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others.One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, yomight hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.

As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective “poor memory”, and each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with insect-covered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect population has dropped dramatically.