full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Spencer Wells: A family tree for humanity

Unscramble the Blue Letters

These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tcnriag a purely mtneraal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, treacs a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, fllas into a lineage somewhere on these teres. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combnie them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home maesgse?

Open Cloze

These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, _______ a purely ________ line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, ______ a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, _____ into a lineage somewhere on these _____. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, _______ them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home _______?

Solution

  1. falls
  2. message
  3. combine
  4. trees
  5. traces
  6. tracing
  7. maternal

Original Text

These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home message?

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
million years 4
ice age 4
african continent 3
common ancestry 3
alive today 3
whirlwind tour 2
big scientific 2
extinct species 2
skull shape 2
eighteenth century 2
human races 2
physical anthropologists 2
homo erectus 2
family tree 2
haploid genome 2
billion nucleotides 2
gave rise 2
stone tools 2
thousand years 2
african success 2
middle east 2
meat locker 2
national geographic 2
legacy fund 2

Important Words

  1. bottom
  2. branches
  3. chromosome
  4. combine
  5. complicated
  6. descent
  7. dna
  8. falls
  9. kind
  10. line
  11. lineage
  12. maternal
  13. men
  14. message
  15. mitochondrial
  16. mother
  17. mtdna
  18. paternal
  19. piece
  20. pieces
  21. purely
  22. real
  23. room
  24. root
  25. sides
  26. simplified
  27. simplify
  28. traces
  29. tracing
  30. tree
  31. trees
  32. turn
  33. versions
  34. widely
  35. woman
  36. work
  37. world