full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Michael Specter: The danger of science denial


Unscramble the Blue Letters


Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of maeesls? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the wrlod last year. That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our mdins, and people like Jenny mcchraty can go around preaching magssees of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to laern it really soon.

Open Cloze


Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of _______? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the _____ last year. That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our _____, and people like Jenny ________ can go around preaching ________ of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to _____ it really soon.

Solution


  1. learn
  2. mccarthy
  3. measles
  4. world
  5. messages
  6. minds

Original Text


Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
time machine 4
genetically engineered 4
engineered food 4
wishful thinking 2
feed billions 2
scientific method 2
good news 2
billion people 2
hate big 2
big placebo 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
genetically engineered food 4


Important Words


  1. audience
  2. causation
  3. correlation
  4. country
  5. death
  6. die
  7. fear
  8. happen
  9. happened
  10. hour
  11. illiteracy
  12. jenny
  13. king
  14. learn
  15. link
  16. live
  17. lot
  18. mccarthy
  19. measles
  20. messages
  21. minds
  22. people
  23. person
  24. platforms
  25. preaching
  26. put
  27. times
  28. understand
  29. world
  30. year