full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Penny Chisholm: The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet
Unscramble the Blue Letters
So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, wigeh less than one pcrenet of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioixde into their bodies that fdees the ocean eycssoetm. How does this tiny auomnt of biomass produce as much as all the ptnlas on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.
Open Cloze
So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, _____ less than one _______ of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon _______ into their bodies that _____ the ocean _________. How does this tiny ______ of biomass produce as much as all the ______ on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.
Solution
- dioxide
- plants
- weigh
- feeds
- percent
- ecosystem
- amount
Original Text
So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. How does this tiny amount of biomass produce as much as all the plants on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
collocation |
frequency |
carbon dioxide |
3 |
open ocean |
3 |
ocean ecosystem |
3 |
fossil fuel |
2 |
billion years |
2 |
solar energy |
2 |
chemical energy |
2 |
carbon bonds |
2 |
plant processed |
2 |
human hair |
2 |
shine blue |
2 |
blue light |
2 |
sequenced hundreds |
2 |
human genome |
2 |
ngrams of length 3
collocation |
frequency |
open ocean ecosystem |
2 |
shine blue light |
2 |
Important Words
- amazon
- amount
- annually
- billion
- biomass
- bodies
- carbon
- collectively
- crank
- dioxide
- divide
- ecosystem
- feeds
- fix
- flowers
- form
- fruits
- grow
- including
- land
- lean
- lungs
- machines
- maintain
- ocean
- percent
- photosynthesis
- photosynthesize
- phytoplankton
- planet
- plants
- produce
- rainforest
- stems
- tiny
- tons
- trunks
- weigh
- year