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
- theoretically
- limit
- living
- simply
- theoretical
- 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
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collocation |
frequency |
petri dishes |
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deep subsurface |
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pine trees |
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living microbial |
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petri dish |
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microbial cells |
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tiny energy |
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cell division |
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single cell |
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Important Words
- adapt
- broken
- cell
- circulatory
- completely
- deep
- disconnected
- dishes
- driven
- energy
- exploit
- fast
- frenetic
- geological
- gradient
- grow
- hundreds
- lifespan
- limit
- live
- lives
- living
- long
- microbe
- parts
- petri
- replacing
- rhythms
- simply
- single
- slow
- subsurface
- sun
- system
- theoretical
- theoretically
- thousands
- time
- tiny
- years