full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Amy Smith: Simple designs to save a life

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to rircestt the oeyxgn that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this coebazrnid material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my stduents was from ghnaa, and he rembeeermd a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte," which is a very sticky prrgiode made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc." In fact, it's grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the caahcorl briquettes. So we did this. We went down to htaii. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these —

Open Cloze

So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to ________ the ______ that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this __________ material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my ________ was from _____, and he __________ a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte," which is a very sticky ________ made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc." In fact, it's grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the ________ briquettes. So we did this. We went down to _____. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these —

Solution

  1. students
  2. haiti
  3. charcoal
  4. remembered
  5. restrict
  6. ghana
  7. oxygen
  8. porridge
  9. carbonized

Original Text

So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this carbonized material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana, and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte," which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc." In fact, it's grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes. So we did this. We went down to Haiti. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these —

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
cooking fuel 6
cow dung 3
cooking fires 2
cleaner burning 2
million deaths 2
alternative cooking 2
sticky porridge 2
charcoal briquettes 2
health impacts 2
wood charcoal 2
fetching water 2
poor farmers 2

Important Words

  1. bagasse
  2. bind
  3. briquettes
  4. burn
  5. burns
  6. called
  7. carbonized
  8. cassava
  9. charbon
  10. charcoal
  11. conveniently
  12. cooking
  13. de
  14. dish
  15. drum
  16. ecole
  17. fact
  18. fifty
  19. find
  20. fine
  21. fire
  22. form
  23. ghana
  24. graduates
  25. grown
  26. haiti
  27. institute
  28. kiln
  29. looked
  30. manioc
  31. material
  32. mom
  33. oil
  34. oxygen
  35. porridge
  36. quickly
  37. remembered
  38. restrict
  39. root
  40. seal
  41. setting
  42. simple
  43. starchy
  44. start
  45. sticky
  46. students
  47. tapioca
  48. thick
  49. time
  50. vegetable
  51. waste
  52. world
  53. yucca