full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Benjamin Seibold: What is phantom traffic and why is it ruining your life?

Unscramble the Blue Letters

For a phantom traffic jam to form, there must be a lot of cars on the road. That doesn’t mean there are necessarily too many cars to pass through a stretch of roadway sotmlohy, at least not if every driver maintains the same consistent speed and spacing from other drivers. In this dense, but flowing, traffic, it only takes a mnior disturbance to set off the cihan of events that causes a traffic jam. Say one deirvr bareks slightly. Each successive driver then brakes a little more strongly, creating a wave of brake lhtigs that propagates backward through the cars on the road. These stop-and-go waves can travel along a highway for melis.

Open Cloze

For a phantom traffic jam to form, there must be a lot of cars on the road. That doesn’t mean there are necessarily too many cars to pass through a stretch of roadway ________, at least not if every driver maintains the same consistent speed and spacing from other drivers. In this dense, but flowing, traffic, it only takes a _____ disturbance to set off the _____ of events that causes a traffic jam. Say one ______ ______ slightly. Each successive driver then brakes a little more strongly, creating a wave of brake ______ that propagates backward through the cars on the road. These stop-and-go waves can travel along a highway for _____.

Solution

  1. miles
  2. lights
  3. driver
  4. chain
  5. brakes
  6. smoothly
  7. minor

Original Text

For a phantom traffic jam to form, there must be a lot of cars on the road. That doesn’t mean there are necessarily too many cars to pass through a stretch of roadway smoothly, at least not if every driver maintains the same consistent speed and spacing from other drivers. In this dense, but flowing, traffic, it only takes a minor disturbance to set off the chain of events that causes a traffic jam. Say one driver brakes slightly. Each successive driver then brakes a little more strongly, creating a wave of brake lights that propagates backward through the cars on the road. These stop-and-go waves can travel along a highway for miles.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
phantom traffic 5
traffic jam 4
brake lights 2
feedback loop 2
drivers tend 2
traffic waves 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
phantom traffic jam 3

Important Words

  1. brake
  2. brakes
  3. cars
  4. chain
  5. consistent
  6. creating
  7. dense
  8. disturbance
  9. driver
  10. drivers
  11. events
  12. flowing
  13. form
  14. highway
  15. jam
  16. lights
  17. lot
  18. maintains
  19. miles
  20. minor
  21. necessarily
  22. pass
  23. phantom
  24. propagates
  25. road
  26. roadway
  27. set
  28. slightly
  29. smoothly
  30. spacing
  31. speed
  32. stretch
  33. strongly
  34. successive
  35. takes
  36. traffic
  37. travel
  38. wave
  39. waves