full transcript
From the Ted Talk by David Deutsch: After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up
Unscramble the Blue Letters
Because, for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations. For their lives, for their descendants' lives. Typically, they expected nothing snifagnclitiy new or better to be achieved, ever. This pessimism famously aapreps in the bilbe, in one of the few biblical passages with a named ahutor. He's cealld Qohelet, he's an enigmatic chap. He wrote, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there something of which it is said, 'Look, this is new.' No, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us."
Open Cloze
Because, for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations. For their lives, for their descendants' lives. Typically, they expected nothing _____________ new or better to be achieved, ever. This pessimism famously _______ in the _____, in one of the few biblical passages with a named ______. He's ______ Qohelet, he's an enigmatic chap. He wrote, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there something of which it is said, 'Look, this is new.' No, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us."
Solution
- called
- appears
- significantly
- bible
- author
Original Text
Because, for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations. For their lives, for their descendants' lives. Typically, they expected nothing significantly new or better to be achieved, ever. This pessimism famously appears in the Bible, in one of the few biblical passages with a named author. He's called Qohelet, he's an enigmatic chap. He wrote, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there something of which it is said, 'Look, this is new.' No, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us."
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
collocation |
frequency |
great monotony |
5 |
explanatory knowledge |
5 |
hierarchy rule |
4 |
overwhelming majority |
2 |
human life |
2 |
living hell |
2 |
cosmic war |
2 |
cosmic forces |
2 |
billion years |
2 |
Important Words
- achieved
- ages
- appears
- author
- bible
- biblical
- called
- centuries
- chap
- dark
- enigmatic
- enlightenment
- expectations
- expected
- famously
- lives
- named
- passages
- people
- pessimism
- qohelet
- revolution
- scientific
- significantly
- sun
- thousands
- time
- typically
- wrote