World News for Students of English

14-12-2021 07:00

Australia’s prime minister said that the country would boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China.

He said that it would be a diplomatic boycott, which meant that athletes would go to China but officials would not. The reasons were mainly reports about human rights abuses in China, and other things, too.

The prime minister said that China did not want to talk about these problems, and the boycott was the only way to show that Australia did not agree with China.

The US was the first country to boycott  the Olympics. Some countries were US partners, and they were not sure what to do because the US was an important partner for them. Still, China was their biggest business partner.

Difficult words: boycott (to stop some activities, usually business activities, with a country or organization to protest against something), human rights (the rights which all people have, and it does not matter where they live or who they are), abuse (the situation when someone behaves badly to someone, or he uses something in a bad way).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.