The recruitment drive to find city volunteers for next year's Olympic and Paralympics, as well as the volunteers for this year's "Good Luck Beijing" test events, will be launched next week, officials from the organizing committee of the Beijing Games, BOCOG, said on Wednesday.

A total of 10,000 volunteers are needed in Beijing for the 23 Olympic test events, mostly scheduled for between August and December this year.

As the competitions will be a good opportunity to rehearse the volunteer working mechanism and management system for next year's Games, all of the volunteers will be selected from among those who have already registered for the Olympics.

Also during the five-month-long test event period, a large number of city volunteers will be assigned to about 150 service stations. These are scattered among Beijing's major traffic hubs, commercial networks, scenic spots, hospitals, hotels, and cultural centers. The volunteers will also be tasked with taking care of the athletes, coaches and officials.

Most of the applicants so far are from Beijing-based universities. Some universities have even seen more than half of their student bodies register.

BOCOG officials have ordered that the organizing committees of the "Good Luck Beijing" events cooperate closely, including Beijing's district governments and universities. They will each share the responsibility of providing meals, transport, insurance and uniforms to the test events' volunteers.

In addition, those volunteers who excel during the test events will be promoted to serve as volunteer leaders at the Olympic and Paralympic Games next year.

Some schools launched a campus-wide screening test to choose test event volunteers last week before submitting their lists of candidates to BOCOG.

Last Saturday, 3,800 Olympic applicants from Beijing University of Technology, where this year's International Badminton Invitational Tournament will be held in October, took a sitting test.

This will be used to check their knowledge of the Olympic Movement, the Beijing Olympics, Chinese history, culture and cross-cultural communication, Beijing's tourism resources, social etiquette and first-aid skills.

As of June 11, more than 520,000 people had applied to volunteer at next year's Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Among them, 57 percent are from Beijing, 36 percent are from other provinces and municipalities in the Chinese mainland, and the rest are from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas, according to BOCOG's Volunteer Department.