SpoGOMI, made up of “sport” and “gomi” (Japanese for “rubbish”) , is a popular competition. During the competition, teams of 3—5 people try to pick up the most rubbish of the highest quality in a set period of time.

Japan recently has announced that it will host the first SpoGOMI World Cup in November 2023.     1     Each team of three players will have 60 minutes to collect the most rubbish from a designated area while trying to sort (分类) it correctly into color-coded (彩色编码的) bags for each type.

    2     And it has held local competitions since 2008. The competition has clear rules. For example, don’t pick up rubbish near roads or railways. In addition, players all wear cleaning gloves and have tongs (钳子) to pick up rubbish.

At the start of the competition, they all shout “Picking up rubbish is a sport!” before running into their designated areas.

When the time is up, all players return to the starting line to have their rubbish weighed and checked.     3     If two teams have the same weight, the winner is decided by the quality of the rubbish. Cigarette butts (烟蒂), for example, win the most points.

“We believe it’s important to collect rubbish in cities, because there has been a sharp increase in the amount of waste in oceans around the world.     4    ” said one of the organizers of the first SpoGOMI World Cup.

Do you always feel lonely? When do you feel lonely? Is loneliness a good feeling? Nowadays more and more people are having this kind of feeling in their daily life. When someone feels lonely, he or she will have an experience of being alone because of low levels of social contact* and relationships*.

There are two kinds of loneliness: emotional* loneliness and social loneliness. Emotional loneliness is about the relationship between parents and their children. When children leave their parents for a while, they usually show the pain, such as crying and trying to search for their parents. Therefore, emotional loneliness is caused by leaving a person that someone is close to, such as a parent. On the other hand, social loneliness is the loneliness that one experiences when he or she leaves a wide social network*. One doesn’t feel that he or she is a member of a group, or one doesn’t have friends to talk to when he or she is sad.

Besides, loneliness is different from being alone. Being alone is about not having contact with people. But loneliness is a subjective experience: if people think they are lonely, then they are lonely. People can be lonely when they are alone, or in a group. What makes people lonely is the fact that they want more social interaction*. People can be in a group and feel lonely because they don’t get to talk to enough people. On the other hand, one can be alone and not feel lonely, though there is no one around him or her. That person is not lonely because maybe he or she doesn’t want to have social interaction* at that time.

So, what about you? Will you feel lonely if you stay alone? Or you just enjoy the time being with yourself.

You can understand how to speak and understand speech during your first few years of life. No one taught you how to do it. Learning to read and write took a lot more effort. Reading doesn’t come naturally to people, but most of us have learned how. Eighty-six percent of the world’s population is literate (有读写能力的), and the number has been increasing for centuries. Literacy makes it possible to make a world filled with books, websites, text messages, road signs, and more.

But the world of information is changing. Why send a long letter or text when you can share photos or videos instead? Why learn from a book when you can learn from a video online or practice a skill in virtual (虚拟的) reality? Why read magazines when you can listen to podcasts (播客)?     

Could a growing number of people take part in today’s world without reading or writing at all? Technology makes it possible. Most of our devices (设备) now talk to us and take spoken commands (命令). Smart cars ask where we will go and then give directions. Software can also read text aloud or turn speech into text. These interactions aren’t perfect — the software still makes silly mistakes. But it’s getting better and better. It’s possible to imagine a future world where all of our communication with our devices and each other is spoken.

But reading and writing are powerful tools. For one, most people read faster than they speak. A podcaster or audio book teller speaks at around 150 to 160 words per minute, while a strong reader can read through a text at 300 to 400 words per minute. That’s twice as fast! Research has also found that people remember more information and stay more interested when they read as compared to listening.

Learning to read also creates new connections in the brain. With the invention of reading, human beings rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded (扩张) the ways we were able to think, which changed the intellectual evolution (智力进化) of our human beings. Would we really choose to give up that progress?

What do you think? Do you hope people keep on reading and writing, or will technology make literacy out of date?