full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Amy Smith: Simple designs to save a life
Unscramble the Blue Letters
About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps vruneolets there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take wtsae paper; you could compress it and make buirqttees that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the thurupghot of this device. So you could inagime they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students.
Open Cloze
About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps __________ there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take _____ paper; you could compress it and make __________ that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the __________ of this device. So you could _______ they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students.
Solution
- volunteers
- throughput
- imagine
- waste
- briquettes
Original Text
About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take waste paper; you could compress it and make briquettes that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the throughput of this device. So you could imagine they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
collocation |
frequency |
cooking fuel |
6 |
cow dung |
3 |
cooking fires |
2 |
cleaner burning |
2 |
million deaths |
2 |
alternative cooking |
2 |
sticky porridge |
2 |
charcoal briquettes |
2 |
health impacts |
2 |
wood charcoal |
2 |
fetching water |
2 |
poor farmers |
2 |
Important Words
- briquettes
- built
- burn
- compress
- corps
- device
- discouraging
- engineering
- excited
- fuel
- haiti
- idea
- imagine
- mit
- peace
- simple
- slow
- students
- team
- test
- throughput
- triple
- village
- volunteer
- volunteers
- waste
- work
- worked
- years