full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Phil Plait: The secret to scientific discoveries? Making mistakes

Unscramble the Blue Letters


When you look at the Sun, it seems special. It is the brightest object in the sky, but having sudteid astronomy, physics, cehmisrty, thermodynamics for centuries, we leerand something very important about it. It's not that special. It's a star just like millions of other stars. But that raeiss an interesting question. If the Sun is a star and the Sun has planets, do these other stars have planets? Well, like I said with my own failure in the "planet" I was looking for, finding them is super hard, but scientists tend to be pretty clever people and they used a lot of different techniques and started observing satrs. And over the dcedeas they started finding some things that were pretty interesting, right on the thin, hairy edge of what they were able to decett. But time and again, it was shown to be wnorg.

Open Cloze


When you look at the Sun, it seems special. It is the brightest object in the sky, but having _______ astronomy, physics, _________, thermodynamics for centuries, we _______ something very important about it. It's not that special. It's a star just like millions of other stars. But that ______ an interesting question. If the Sun is a star and the Sun has planets, do these other stars have planets? Well, like I said with my own failure in the "planet" I was looking for, finding them is super hard, but scientists tend to be pretty clever people and they used a lot of different techniques and started observing _____. And over the _______ they started finding some things that were pretty interesting, right on the thin, hairy edge of what they were able to ______. But time and again, it was shown to be _____.

Solution


  1. stars
  2. chemistry
  3. wrong
  4. decades
  5. raises
  6. studied
  7. detect
  8. learned

Original Text


When you look at the Sun, it seems special. It is the brightest object in the sky, but having studied astronomy, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics for centuries, we learned something very important about it. It's not that special. It's a star just like millions of other stars. But that raises an interesting question. If the Sun is a star and the Sun has planets, do these other stars have planets? Well, like I said with my own failure in the "planet" I was looking for, finding them is super hard, but scientists tend to be pretty clever people and they used a lot of different techniques and started observing stars. And over the decades they started finding some things that were pretty interesting, right on the thin, hairy edge of what they were able to detect. But time and again, it was shown to be wrong.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
planet orbiting 5
planets orbiting 3
started finding 3


Important Words


  1. astronomy
  2. brightest
  3. centuries
  4. chemistry
  5. clever
  6. decades
  7. detect
  8. edge
  9. failure
  10. finding
  11. hairy
  12. hard
  13. important
  14. interesting
  15. learned
  16. lot
  17. millions
  18. object
  19. observing
  20. people
  21. physics
  22. planets
  23. pretty
  24. question
  25. raises
  26. scientists
  27. shown
  28. sky
  29. special
  30. star
  31. stars
  32. started
  33. studied
  34. sun
  35. super
  36. techniques
  37. tend
  38. thermodynamics
  39. thin
  40. time
  41. wrong