full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Catherine Mohr: The tradeoffs of building green

Unscramble the Blue Letters


(Laughter)

So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least ecxpet — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to omitizpe. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to bilud a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how geren could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and misinsg the elephant in the living room. Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it tkeas to make it — millions and millions of paper towels.

Open Cloze


(Laughter)

So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least ______ — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to ________. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to _____ a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how _____ could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and _______ the elephant in the living room. Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it _____ to make it — millions and millions of paper towels.

Solution


  1. build
  2. optimize
  3. missing
  4. takes
  5. green
  6. expect

Original Text


(Laughter)

So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room. Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it — millions and millions of paper towels.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
embodied energy 11
paper towel 4
paper towels 2
living room 2
megawatt hours 2


Important Words


  1. articles
  2. average
  3. bigger
  4. build
  5. edges
  6. effect
  7. elephant
  8. embodied
  9. energy
  10. expect
  11. green
  12. handle
  13. hours
  14. house
  15. husband
  16. imagine
  17. laughter
  18. living
  19. megawatt
  20. millions
  21. missing
  22. optimize
  23. paper
  24. position
  25. put
  26. room
  27. suspect
  28. takes
  29. telling
  30. thousand
  31. towels
  32. twisted
  33. wanted