2023 年 北京卷

1The International Olympic Committee(IOC)Young Leaders programme empowers talents to make a positive difference in their communities through sport. Twenty-five Young Leaders are being selected every two years for a four-year period. They promote the Olympic values, spreading the message of sport for good.

2To be an IOC Young Leader, you need to first complete the 4-Week Learning Sprint (冲刺).

34-Week Learning Sprint

4The 4-Week Learning Sprint, which will take place during November 2023, is a virtual learning programme. The sessions can be attended live or watched back after they are made available on the IOC channel. Each week, participants will be asked to complete a topic﹣specific reflection task.

5The 4-Week Learning Sprint is open to anyone, with the target audience aged between 20 and 28.

6After successfully completing the 4-Week Learning Sprint, you will need to submit a plan for a sport﹣based project, which you will work on if selected as an IOC Young Leader.

7Requirements for the Applicants

8•You have successfully completed the 4-Week Learning Sprint.

9•You have completed your high school studies.

10•You have at least one year of work experience.

11•You have strong public speaking skills.

12•You are self-motivated and committed.

13•You are passionate about creating positive change in your community.

14•You are open to being coached and advised by experts and peers (同伴).

15•You are able to work with people from different backgrounds.

1Sitting 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 you for 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.

2I 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.

3So 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.

4I 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.

5When 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.

6Rather 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.

1In 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”.

2It 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.

3These 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, you might 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.

4As 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.

1What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one type of life and it’s challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The field of artificial life-called ALife for short — is the systematic attempt to spell out life’s fundamental principles. Many of these practitioners, so-called ALifers, think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life is.

2So far no one has convincingly made artificial life. This track record makes ALife a ripe target for criticism, such as declarations of the field’s doubtful scientific value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking about “the point” of ALife might be, well, missing the point entirely, he says. “The existence of a living system is not about the use of anything.” Alan says. “Some people ask me, ‘So what’s the worth of artificial life?’ Do you ever think, ‘What is the worth of your grandmother?’”

3As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.

4Compared with the developments of Al, advances in ALife are harder to recognize. One reason is that ALife is a field in which the central concept — life itself — is undefined. The lack of agreement among ALifers doesn’t help either. The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique paths. For better or worse, ALife mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled (混乱的) progression is a striking parallel (平行线) to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped Earth biosphere.

5Undefined and uncontrolled, ALife drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren’t in any way surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution. Ultimately ALife may be nothing special. But even this dismissal suggests something：perhaps, just like life itself throughout the universe, the rise of ALife will prove unavoidable.