[originaltext] Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Today, I’d like to talk

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Today, I’d like to talk about making choices with you. Think of a hard choice you’ll face in the near future. It might be between two careers—artist and accountant. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, or whether to donate your life savings to charity.
    Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, and something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing. But I think we’ve misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses.
    What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In an easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn’t know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there’s always a best alternative. If there’s a best alternative, then that’s the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reasons to choose. In such a world, we’d have most reasons to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, and to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons.
    So when we face hard choices, we shouldn’t beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us.
    Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that’s why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.
    Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.
    23. What do most people think of hard choices?
    24. What makes choices hard for us according to the speaker?
    25. Why are hard choices a godsend?