full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Dan Gilbert: Why we make bad decisions
Unscramble the Blue Letters
The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an ellncexet test-case of people's ability to cmopute probabilities. And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any poayff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the sorte and buy anything.
Open Cloze
The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an _________ test-case of people's ability to _______ probabilities. And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any ______ by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the _____ and buy anything.
Solution
- excellent
- payoff
- compute
- store
Original Text
The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an excellent test-case of people's ability to compute probabilities. And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| big mac |
5 |
| potato chips |
5 |
| lottery ticket |
3 |
| good deal |
3 |
| damn bit |
2 |
| everyday life |
2 |
| people die |
2 |
| swimming pool |
2 |
| hawaiian vacation |
2 |
| behavioral economists |
2 |
| shifting comparisons |
2 |
| money saved |
2 |
| making decisions |
2 |
| large people |
2 |
| dynamic inconsistency |
2 |
| good reason |
2 |
| good feeling |
2 |
| economists tend |
2 |
| stupid people |
2 |
| aubrey de |
2 |
Important Words
- ability
- approximately
- buy
- compute
- economists
- equivalent
- excellent
- flushing
- forgive
- investing
- lottery
- money
- odds
- payoff
- play
- probabilities
- refer
- require
- store
- stupidity
- tax
- ticket
- toilet