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
- miles
- lights
- driver
- chain
- brakes
- smoothly
- 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
- brake
- brakes
- cars
- chain
- consistent
- creating
- dense
- disturbance
- driver
- drivers
- events
- flowing
- form
- highway
- jam
- lights
- lot
- maintains
- miles
- minor
- necessarily
- pass
- phantom
- propagates
- road
- roadway
- set
- slightly
- smoothly
- spacing
- speed
- stretch
- strongly
- successive
- takes
- traffic
- travel
- wave
- waves