full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Daniel Finkel: Can you solve the dark matter fuel riddle?

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Wherever pnoit X is, you’ll jump forward from it twice: once to deposit some fuel at the 8-parsec cache point, and a second time for good. So you’ll jump the distance between X and 8-parsecs 3 times in all. You’d have 2 tkans of fuel at point X, and need 1 left at the 8 parsec cache point, so you can spend one tank— or 15 units— going back and forth. Since 15 untis divided by 3 trips is 5, we can place these two cache points 5 parsecs apart. Any farther, and you wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the alien sacpe saoittn.

Open Cloze

Wherever _____ X is, you’ll jump forward from it twice: once to deposit some fuel at the 8-parsec cache point, and a second time for good. So you’ll jump the distance between X and 8-parsecs 3 times in all. You’d have 2 _____ of fuel at point X, and need 1 left at the 8 parsec cache point, so you can spend one tank— or 15 units— going back and forth. Since 15 _____ divided by 3 trips is 5, we can place these two cache points 5 parsecs apart. Any farther, and you wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the alien _____ _______.

Solution

  1. point
  2. units
  3. tanks
  4. station
  5. space

Original Text

Wherever point X is, you’ll jump forward from it twice: once to deposit some fuel at the 8-parsec cache point, and a second time for good. So you’ll jump the distance between X and 8-parsecs 3 times in all. You’d have 2 tanks of fuel at point X, and need 1 left at the 8 parsec cache point, so you can spend one tank— or 15 units— going back and forth. Since 15 units divided by 3 trips is 5, we can place these two cache points 5 parsecs apart. Any farther, and you wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the alien space station.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
space station 5
alien space 4
ship holds 2
deep space 2
full tank 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
alien space station 3

Important Words

  1. alien
  2. cache
  3. deposit
  4. distance
  5. divided
  6. fuel
  7. good
  8. jump
  9. left
  10. parsec
  11. parsecs
  12. place
  13. point
  14. points
  15. reach
  16. space
  17. spend
  18. station
  19. tanks
  20. time
  21. times
  22. trips
  23. units