full transcript

From the Ted Talk by David Lee: Why jobs of the future won't feel like work

Unscramble the Blue Letters

The good news is that we have faced down and rveroceed two mass extinctions of jobs before. From 1870 to 1970, the percent of American workers based on farms fell by 90 percent, and then again from 1950 to 2010, the percent of Americans working in factories fell by 75 percent. The challenge we face this time, however, is one of time. We had a hundred yraes to move from farms to factories, and then 60 years to flluy build out a srcviee eomocny. The rate of change today sugtesgs that we may only have 10 or 15 years to adjust, and if we don't react fast enough, that means by the time today's elementary-school students are college-aged, we could be living in a world that's rbtooic, largely unemployed and scutk in kind of un-great depression.

Open Cloze

The good news is that we have faced down and _________ two mass extinctions of jobs before. From 1870 to 1970, the percent of American workers based on farms fell by 90 percent, and then again from 1950 to 2010, the percent of Americans working in factories fell by 75 percent. The challenge we face this time, however, is one of time. We had a hundred _____ to move from farms to factories, and then 60 years to _____ build out a _______ _______. The rate of change today ________ that we may only have 10 or 15 years to adjust, and if we don't react fast enough, that means by the time today's elementary-school students are college-aged, we could be living in a world that's _______, largely unemployed and _____ in kind of un-great depression.

Solution

  1. recovered
  2. fully
  3. economy
  4. years
  5. suggests
  6. stuck
  7. service
  8. robotic

Original Text

The good news is that we have faced down and recovered two mass extinctions of jobs before. From 1870 to 1970, the percent of American workers based on farms fell by 90 percent, and then again from 1950 to 2010, the percent of Americans working in factories fell by 75 percent. The challenge we face this time, however, is one of time. We had a hundred years to move from farms to factories, and then 60 years to fully build out a service economy. The rate of change today suggests that we may only have 10 or 15 years to adjust, and if we don't react fast enough, that means by the time today's elementary-school students are college-aged, we could be living in a world that's robotic, largely unemployed and stuck in kind of un-great depression.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
human beings 4
jobless future 2
create environments 2
narrow job 2
working lives 2

Important Words

  1. adjust
  2. american
  3. americans
  4. based
  5. build
  6. challenge
  7. change
  8. depression
  9. economy
  10. extinctions
  11. face
  12. faced
  13. factories
  14. farms
  15. fast
  16. fell
  17. fully
  18. good
  19. jobs
  20. kind
  21. largely
  22. living
  23. mass
  24. means
  25. move
  26. news
  27. percent
  28. rate
  29. react
  30. recovered
  31. robotic
  32. service
  33. stuck
  34. students
  35. suggests
  36. time
  37. today
  38. unemployed
  39. workers
  40. working
  41. world
  42. years