full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Barry Schwartz: What role does luck play in your life?

Unscramble the Blue Letters

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me there's a way to fix this problem. And here's what we could do: when people apply to college, we distinguish between the aaplitpcns who are good enough to be successful and the ones who aren't, and we reject the ones who aren't good enough to be ssfucucesl, and then we take all of the others, and we put their names in a hat, and we just pick them out at random and admit them. In other words, we do college admsnisois by lertoty, and maybe we do job offers at tech companies by lottery, and — perish the thought — maybe we even make dnesiicos about who gets invited to talk at TED by lottery.

Open Cloze

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me there's a way to fix this problem. And here's what we could do: when people apply to college, we distinguish between the __________ who are good enough to be successful and the ones who aren't, and we reject the ones who aren't good enough to be __________, and then we take all of the others, and we put their names in a hat, and we just pick them out at random and admit them. In other words, we do college __________ by _______, and maybe we do job offers at tech companies by lottery, and — perish the thought — maybe we even make _________ about who gets invited to talk at TED by lottery.

Solution

  1. applicants
  2. decisions
  3. successful
  4. lottery
  5. admissions

Original Text

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me there's a way to fix this problem. And here's what we could do: when people apply to college, we distinguish between the applicants who are good enough to be successful and the ones who aren't, and we reject the ones who aren't good enough to be successful, and then we take all of the others, and we put their names in a hat, and we just pick them out at random and admit them. In other words, we do college admissions by lottery, and maybe we do job offers at tech companies by lottery, and — perish the thought — maybe we even make decisions about who gets invited to talk at TED by lottery.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
high school 3
college admissions 2

Important Words

  1. admissions
  2. admit
  3. applicants
  4. apply
  5. college
  6. companies
  7. decisions
  8. distinguish
  9. fix
  10. good
  11. hat
  12. invited
  13. job
  14. lottery
  15. names
  16. occurred
  17. offers
  18. people
  19. perish
  20. pick
  21. problem
  22. put
  23. random
  24. reject
  25. successful
  26. talk
  27. tech
  28. ted
  29. thinking
  30. thought
  31. words