full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Juna Kollmeier: The most detailed map of galaxies, black holes and stars ever made

Unscramble the Blue Letters


When I was a kid, I was aafrid of the dark. The darkness is where the monsters are. And I had this little ngiht light outside of my bdrooem so that it would never get too dark. But over time, my fear of the dark turned to curiosity. What is out there in the "dark-dark?" And it tnurs out that trying to understand the darkness is something that's fascinated hanums for thousands of years, maybe forever. And we know this because we find their ancient relics of their attempts to map the sky.

This tusk is over 30,000 years old. Some people think that it's a carving of Orion or maybe a calendar. We don't know. The Fuxi star map is over 6,000 years old, and it's from a neolithic tomb in anenict cnhia. And that little pile of clamshells underneath the dead guy's foot in the middle — that's supposed to be the Big Dipper. Maybe. The Nebra disk is uncontroversial. You don't have to be an astronomer to know that you're looking at the Moon phsaes or the Sun in eclipse. And that little group of seven stars, that's the Pleiades, the Seven sretsis.

Open Cloze


When I was a kid, I was ______ of the dark. The darkness is where the monsters are. And I had this little _____ light outside of my _______ so that it would never get too dark. But over time, my fear of the dark turned to curiosity. What is out there in the "dark-dark?" And it _____ out that trying to understand the darkness is something that's fascinated ______ for thousands of years, maybe forever. And we know this because we find their ancient relics of their attempts to map the sky.

This tusk is over 30,000 years old. Some people think that it's a carving of Orion or maybe a calendar. We don't know. The Fuxi star map is over 6,000 years old, and it's from a neolithic tomb in _______ _____. And that little pile of clamshells underneath the dead guy's foot in the middle — that's supposed to be the Big Dipper. Maybe. The Nebra disk is uncontroversial. You don't have to be an astronomer to know that you're looking at the Moon ______ or the Sun in eclipse. And that little group of seven stars, that's the Pleiades, the Seven _______.

Solution


  1. ancient
  2. sisters
  3. china
  4. turns
  5. night
  6. bedroom
  7. phases
  8. afraid
  9. humans

Original Text


When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark. The darkness is where the monsters are. And I had this little night light outside of my bedroom so that it would never get too dark. But over time, my fear of the dark turned to curiosity. What is out there in the "dark-dark?" And it turns out that trying to understand the darkness is something that's fascinated humans for thousands of years, maybe forever. And we know this because we find their ancient relics of their attempts to map the sky.

This tusk is over 30,000 years old. Some people think that it's a carving of Orion or maybe a calendar. We don't know. The Fuxi star map is over 6,000 years old, and it's from a neolithic tomb in ancient China. And that little pile of clamshells underneath the dead guy's foot in the middle — that's supposed to be the Big Dipper. Maybe. The Nebra disk is uncontroversial. You don't have to be an astronomer to know that you're looking at the Moon phases or the Sun in eclipse. And that little group of seven stars, that's the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
black holes 7
moon phases 2
observable universe 2
average galaxy 2
focal plane 2
sky multiple 2
multiple times 2
totally average 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
sky multiple times 2

Important Words


  1. afraid
  2. ancient
  3. astronomer
  4. attempts
  5. bedroom
  6. big
  7. calendar
  8. carving
  9. china
  10. clamshells
  11. curiosity
  12. dark
  13. darkness
  14. dead
  15. dipper
  16. disk
  17. eclipse
  18. fascinated
  19. fear
  20. find
  21. foot
  22. fuxi
  23. group
  24. humans
  25. kid
  26. light
  27. map
  28. middle
  29. monsters
  30. moon
  31. nebra
  32. neolithic
  33. night
  34. orion
  35. people
  36. phases
  37. pile
  38. pleiades
  39. relics
  40. sisters
  41. sky
  42. star
  43. stars
  44. sun
  45. supposed
  46. thousands
  47. time
  48. tomb
  49. turned
  50. turns
  51. tusk
  52. uncontroversial
  53. understand
  54. years