full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Karen Lloyd: This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life

Unscramble the Blue Letters

But the deep subsurface is like a circulatory system that's completely disconnected from the Sun. It's instead being driven by long, slow geological rhythms. There's currently no thcteraoeil liimt on the lifespan of one single cell. As long as there is at least a tiny energy gradient to exploit, teltiahceroly, a sgilne cell could live for hundreds of thousands of years or more, slimpy by replacing broken parts over time. To ask a microbe that lives like that to grow in our petri dishes is to ask them to adapt to our frenetic, Sun-centric, fast way of lvinig, and maybe they've got better things to do than that.

Open Cloze

But the deep subsurface is like a circulatory system that's completely disconnected from the Sun. It's instead being driven by long, slow geological rhythms. There's currently no ___________ _____ on the lifespan of one single cell. As long as there is at least a tiny energy gradient to exploit, _____________, a ______ cell could live for hundreds of thousands of years or more, ______ by replacing broken parts over time. To ask a microbe that lives like that to grow in our petri dishes is to ask them to adapt to our frenetic, Sun-centric, fast way of ______, and maybe they've got better things to do than that.

Solution

  1. theoretically
  2. limit
  3. living
  4. simply
  5. theoretical
  6. single

Original Text

But the deep subsurface is like a circulatory system that's completely disconnected from the Sun. It's instead being driven by long, slow geological rhythms. There's currently no theoretical limit on the lifespan of one single cell. As long as there is at least a tiny energy gradient to exploit, theoretically, a single cell could live for hundreds of thousands of years or more, simply by replacing broken parts over time. To ask a microbe that lives like that to grow in our petri dishes is to ask them to adapt to our frenetic, Sun-centric, fast way of living, and maybe they've got better things to do than that.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
petri dishes 5
deep subsurface 4
pine trees 3
living microbial 2
petri dish 2
microbial cells 2
tiny energy 2
cell division 2
single cell 2

Important Words

  1. adapt
  2. broken
  3. cell
  4. circulatory
  5. completely
  6. deep
  7. disconnected
  8. dishes
  9. driven
  10. energy
  11. exploit
  12. fast
  13. frenetic
  14. geological
  15. gradient
  16. grow
  17. hundreds
  18. lifespan
  19. limit
  20. live
  21. lives
  22. living
  23. long
  24. microbe
  25. parts
  26. petri
  27. replacing
  28. rhythms
  29. simply
  30. single
  31. slow
  32. subsurface
  33. sun
  34. system
  35. theoretical
  36. theoretically
  37. thousands
  38. time
  39. tiny
  40. years