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
- applicants
- decisions
- successful
- lottery
- 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
- admissions
- admit
- applicants
- apply
- college
- companies
- decisions
- distinguish
- fix
- good
- hat
- invited
- job
- lottery
- names
- occurred
- offers
- people
- perish
- pick
- problem
- put
- random
- reject
- successful
- talk
- tech
- ted
- thinking
- thought
- words