轻松英语阅读：奥林匹克的那些事儿

Speaking of Olympic trivia, the Sochi Olympics are already breaking many records. Probably the most surprising is the cost of the games. According to some estimates, this will be the most expensive Olympic Games ever, summer or winter. In fact, at 51 billion dollars it will total more than every previous Winter Olympics combined. A lot of that money will be going to security. This will be the most heavily guarded Olympics in history.

This year’s Olympics are expensive, but that money is not going into making bronze medals. A bronze medal is made of an alloy of tin and copper and costs around five dollars.

But third place winners can't complain too much; in the early Olympics they didn’t even get a medal. At the Paris Games in 1900 even the first place winners didn’t get a medal; they got trophiesinstead.

Did you know that an Olympic gold medal is made almost entirely of sterling silver? Yes, it’s true. In fact, the only difference between it and the silver medal is about six grams of gold covering the surface. The last time somebody got a pure gold medal was at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

Medals that will be given out on February 15 will have a special ingredient. They will contain fragments of the meteorite which crashed into Russia last year on the same date. It will be the first cosmic medal— a pretty cool idea, don’t you think?