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When we hear about the number of Olympics medals each country wins, we usually hear the total. The top five or six countries are almost always the same: the U.S., U.K., Russia, Germany, France and China. When you think about the huge population and wealth of those countries, it makes sense that they would win the most medals.

But this leaves smaller countries who perform better than their relative size and wealth out of the spotlight. Think of Australia, a country of 25 million. Compare that to America's 328 million. You might expect the U.S. to win well over ten times more medals than Australia. But that's not what happens.

Toyota was the leader in eco-friendly hybrid vehicles for many years, according to ArsTechnica. The automotive company had a fuel-efficiency edge over its competition. However, it has recently struggled to compete with companies that sell electric vehicles such as Tesla, Nissan and Volkswagen.

Toyota has made two critical choices. First, it tethered itself to hybrids. Second, it bet its future on hydrogen. But now governments around the world are moving to ban fossil-fuel vehicles of any kind.

According to the National Geographic Society, Earth now has a new ocean: the Southern Ocean.

Geographers have debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. 

With a range stretching the circumference of Antarctica to the 60-degrees South latitudinal line, the Southern Ocean “encompasses unique and fragile marine ecosystems that are home to wonderful marine life such as whales, penguins, and seals,” explains National Geographic’s Enric Sala. The region includes such creatures as migrating humpback whales and many different seabirds.

According to The Guardian, the renowned Swiss architect Le Corbusier developed a system that has shaped much of the world. It dictates everything from the height of a door handle to the scale of a staircase. But the system, Le Modulor, developed in the 1940s, was created with a handsome six-foot-tall British policeman in mind. So all sizes are governed by the need to make everything as convenient as possible for Le Corbusier’s ideal man.

The system's influence even extended to the size of city blocks, since these responded to the size and needs of the car the ideal man drove to work.

By the 1980s, some women had had enough. After decades of struggling with prams and shopping trolleys, navigating dark underpasses, blind alleyways and subways in the cities mostly made by men, it was time for a different approach.

National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.

Murakami said, "There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own 'first personal singular' writing."

Murakami goes on to explain that he often writes characters based on his personal experiences and rewrites them multiple times to the point that the experiences become fictional and hard to recognize from his own life.

According to The Economist, in April 2021, Apple, which supplies one-fifth of the world’s smartphones and around half of the United States', introduced a software update that will end targeted advertisement by companies. Its latest mobile operating system forces apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Many are expected to decline. It is the latest privacy move forcing marketers to rethink how they target online ads.

By micro-profiling audiences and monitoring their behavior, digital-ad platforms claim to solve advertisers’ problem of not knowing which half of their budget is being wasted. According to Group M, the world’s largest media buyer, in the past decade, digital ads have gone from less than 20% of the global ad market to more than 60%.

First, make a choice about how to watch the film. It is about 7 minutes. You have a few options.

1. Watch the film before the lesson as pre-study homework.
2. Watch part of the film in the lesson.
3. Watch the whole film in the lesson. 
   • If you choose to watch the film, please do your best to describe and discuss it as you watch. There's almost no dialog, so you can easily talk while watching.

This discussion topic is based on a short film by Pixar, called "Float". It uses metaphor to express a complex truth in simple terms.

What is a metaphor? It's saying one thing is another thing, but it's not literally true. Here are some examples:

Bloomberg News reports that according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, which polled 30,000 people from a variety of companies in 31 countries and used trillions of data points, the majority of workers feel they are struggling or just surviving in pandemic work conditions and a large percentage are considering leaving their employer this year.

Nearly half of respondents said they are planning to move to a new location this year, which reflects the greater flexibility of working from home. Also, 41% of those surveyed said they're mulling leaving their jobs. The data found that burnout is widespread: 54% of workers said they are overworked and 39% said they are exhausted. 

The English National Opera (ENO) has teamed up with a London hospital to teach breathing techniques to people recovering from COVID-19. One of the common lingering effects of the virus is difficulty breathing. Proper breathing is essential for opera singers, so they're in a unique position to help patients recover. 

When in-house opera concerts were cancelled due to the pandemic, the ENO wanted to find other ways to use their skills to help others. They realized they are experts in breathing, so they created a 6-week program, called ENO Breathe, that uses therapeutic techniques reworked by singers. The techniques help restore lung capacity, as well as lessen anxiety through deep breathing exercises.