full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Graham Hill: Less stuff, more happiness

Unscramble the Blue Letters


What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've tevlerad with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

snoud familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 yreas ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra sapce, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal stagore. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of cdeirt card debt, huge environmental ftrtpinoos, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years.

Open Cloze


What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've ________ with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

_____ familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 _____ ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra _____, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal _______. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of ______ card debt, huge environmental __________, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years.

Solution


  1. credit
  2. footprints
  3. space
  4. sound
  5. traveled
  6. years
  7. storage

Original Text


What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Sound familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
smaller footprint 2
life edited 2


Important Words


  1. americans
  2. amount
  3. apartment
  4. applause
  5. billion
  6. box
  7. card
  8. coincidentally
  9. credit
  10. debt
  11. environmental
  12. extra
  13. familiar
  14. footprints
  15. ft
  16. good
  17. happiness
  18. huge
  19. important
  20. industry
  21. laughter
  22. lead
  23. levels
  24. lots
  25. moved
  26. nope
  27. personal
  28. plenty
  29. pretty
  30. room
  31. shoppers
  32. sound
  33. space
  34. sq
  35. storage
  36. stuff
  37. times
  38. town
  39. traveled
  40. triple
  41. years