full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Tierney Thys and Christian Sardet: Meet the microbes that could eat your trash

Unscramble the Blue Letters


At this very moment, almost everything around you is being eaten. Invisible to the naked eye, organisms called microbes swarm every surface. Hordes of biaecrta, archaea, and fungi have evolved to produce powerful enzymes that break down tough organic mteaaril into dstbgleiie nutrients.

But there’s one particularly widespread type of material that almost no microbes can biodegrade: plastics. To make most plastics, molecules from oil, gas and coal are reinfed and trnued into long, repeating chains called polymers. This process often requires temperatures above 100˚C, incredibly high pressure, and various chemical modifications. The resulting man-made perymlos are quite different from the polymers found in nuatre. And since they’ve only been around since the 1950s, most mbocries haven’t had time to evolve enzymes to digest them. Making matters even more diflicfut, breaking most plastics’ chemical bonds reueirqs high temperatures comparable to those used to create them— and such heat is deadly to most microbes.

Open Cloze


At this very moment, almost everything around you is being eaten. Invisible to the naked eye, organisms called microbes swarm every surface. Hordes of ________, archaea, and fungi have evolved to produce powerful enzymes that break down tough organic ________ into __________ nutrients.

But there’s one particularly widespread type of material that almost no microbes can biodegrade: plastics. To make most plastics, molecules from oil, gas and coal are _______ and ______ into long, repeating chains called polymers. This process often requires temperatures above 100˚C, incredibly high pressure, and various chemical modifications. The resulting man-made ________ are quite different from the polymers found in ______. And since they’ve only been around since the 1950s, most ________ haven’t had time to evolve enzymes to digest them. Making matters even more _________, breaking most plastics’ chemical bonds ________ high temperatures comparable to those used to create them— and such heat is deadly to most microbes.

Solution


  1. refined
  2. polymers
  3. difficult
  4. nature
  5. material
  6. requires
  7. turned
  8. bacteria
  9. microbes
  10. digestible

Original Text


At this very moment, almost everything around you is being eaten. Invisible to the naked eye, organisms called microbes swarm every surface. Hordes of bacteria, archaea, and fungi have evolved to produce powerful enzymes that break down tough organic material into digestible nutrients.

But there’s one particularly widespread type of material that almost no microbes can biodegrade: plastics. To make most plastics, molecules from oil, gas and coal are refined and turned into long, repeating chains called polymers. This process often requires temperatures above 100˚C, incredibly high pressure, and various chemical modifications. The resulting man-made polymers are quite different from the polymers found in nature. And since they’ve only been around since the 1950s, most microbes haven’t had time to evolve enzymes to digest them. Making matters even more difficult, breaking most plastics’ chemical bonds requires high temperatures comparable to those used to create them— and such heat is deadly to most microbes.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
pet polymers 2
high temperature 2


Important Words


  1. archaea
  2. bacteria
  3. bonds
  4. break
  5. breaking
  6. called
  7. chains
  8. chemical
  9. coal
  10. comparable
  11. create
  12. deadly
  13. difficult
  14. digest
  15. digestible
  16. eaten
  17. enzymes
  18. evolve
  19. evolved
  20. eye
  21. fungi
  22. gas
  23. heat
  24. high
  25. hordes
  26. incredibly
  27. invisible
  28. long
  29. making
  30. material
  31. matters
  32. microbes
  33. modifications
  34. molecules
  35. moment
  36. naked
  37. nature
  38. nutrients
  39. oil
  40. organic
  41. organisms
  42. plastics
  43. polymers
  44. powerful
  45. pressure
  46. process
  47. produce
  48. refined
  49. repeating
  50. requires
  51. resulting
  52. surface
  53. swarm
  54. temperatures
  55. time
  56. tough
  57. turned
  58. type
  59. widespread