full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Alan Smith: Why you should love statistics

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Now, as useful as studies like these are, I think we risk hrednig pleope inadvertently into one of two categories; that there are two kinds of people: those people that are comfortable with numbers, that can do numbers, and the people who can't. And what I'm trying to talk about here today is to say that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. I think you don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting pinot to the jnueory ahead.

Open Cloze

Now, as useful as studies like these are, I think we risk _______ ______ inadvertently into one of two categories; that there are two kinds of people: those people that are comfortable with numbers, that can do numbers, and the people who can't. And what I'm trying to talk about here today is to say that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. I think you don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting _____ to the _______ ahead.

Solution

  1. journey
  2. point
  3. herding
  4. people

Original Text

Now, as useful as studies like these are, I think we risk herding people inadvertently into one of two categories; that there are two kinds of people: those people that are comfortable with numbers, that can do numbers, and the people who can't. And what I'm trying to talk about here today is to say that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. I think you don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting point to the journey ahead.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
official figures 3
numeracy skills 2
english problem 2
ipsos mori 2
average answer 2
big variation 2
teenage girls 2
british public 2
post code 2
census data 2
repeating icons 2

Important Words

  1. comfortable
  2. dichotomy
  3. false
  4. herding
  5. high
  6. immutable
  7. inadvertently
  8. inspired
  9. journey
  10. kinds
  11. levels
  12. numbers
  13. numeracy
  14. pairing
  15. people
  16. point
  17. risk
  18. starting
  19. studies
  20. talk
  21. today
  22. tremendously