full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Martin Rees: Is this our final century?
Unscramble the Blue Letters
On a still bigger salce, we see entire giaxlaes of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cissmlogoot, these galaxies are just the aomts, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hrueddns of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carobn and iron, the building boklcs of planets and of life. We believe that all of this eeegrmd from a Big Bang — a hot, dnese state. So how did that aphomuros Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?
Open Cloze
On a still bigger _____, we see entire ________ of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the ___________, these galaxies are just the _____, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here ________ of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and ______ and iron, the building ______ of planets and of life. We believe that all of this _______ from a Big Bang — a hot, _____ state. So how did that _________ Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?
Solution
- blocks
- scale
- carbon
- galaxies
- cosmologist
- dense
- emerged
- amorphous
- hundreds
- atoms
Original Text
On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| billion years |
4 |
| big bang |
4 |
| solar system |
2 |
| big bangs |
2 |
| complex structure |
2 |
| world faster |
2 |
| metallic objects |
2 |
Important Words
- amorphous
- andromeda
- atoms
- bang
- big
- bigger
- billion
- blank
- blocks
- building
- carbon
- chance
- complex
- cosmologist
- cosmos
- cover
- dense
- ecosystems
- emerged
- entire
- faint
- full
- fully
- fusion
- galaxies
- galaxy
- gas
- hot
- hundreds
- iron
- life
- light
- moon
- nuclear
- patch
- patches
- picture
- planets
- recycled
- scale
- scant
- shows
- silicon
- sky
- small
- smudges
- stars
- state
- telescope
- time
- turn
- universe