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

  1. called
  2. appears
  3. significantly
  4. bible
  5. 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

  1. achieved
  2. ages
  3. appears
  4. author
  5. bible
  6. biblical
  7. called
  8. centuries
  9. chap
  10. dark
  11. enigmatic
  12. enlightenment
  13. expectations
  14. expected
  15. famously
  16. lives
  17. named
  18. passages
  19. people
  20. pessimism
  21. qohelet
  22. revolution
  23. scientific
  24. significantly
  25. sun
  26. thousands
  27. time
  28. typically
  29. wrote