full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Alex Rosenthal: The world's largest organism

Unscramble the Blue Letters


This is Goliath, the krill. Don’t get too attached. Today this 1 centimeter crustacean will share the same fate as 40 million of his coseslt friends: a life sentence in the belly of the lasergt blue whale in the world. Let’s call her liahteva. Leviatha weighs something like 150 metric tons, and she’s the largest animal in the world. But she’s not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to eauql about 40 Leviatha’s. So where is this behemoth?

Here, in Utah. Sorry, that’s too close. Here. This is Pando, whose name means “I speard out.” Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly 47,000 gnllciaetey identical clone trunks. Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a silnge organism. Pando is the clear winner of world’s largest organism by weight— an irclneidbe 6 million klirogmas.

Open Cloze


This is Goliath, the krill. Don’t get too attached. Today this 1 centimeter crustacean will share the same fate as 40 million of his _______ friends: a life sentence in the belly of the _______ blue whale in the world. Let’s call her ________. Leviatha weighs something like 150 metric tons, and she’s the largest animal in the world. But she’s not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to _____ about 40 Leviatha’s. So where is this behemoth?

Here, in Utah. Sorry, that’s too close. Here. This is Pando, whose name means “I ______ out.” Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly 47,000 ___________ identical clone trunks. Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a ______ organism. Pando is the clear winner of world’s largest organism by weight— an __________ 6 million _________.

Solution


  1. incredible
  2. closest
  3. kilograms
  4. largest
  5. single
  6. leviatha
  7. equal
  8. genetically
  9. spread

Original Text


This is Goliath, the krill. Don’t get too attached. Today this 1 centimeter crustacean will share the same fate as 40 million of his closest friends: a life sentence in the belly of the largest blue whale in the world. Let’s call her Leviatha. Leviatha weighs something like 150 metric tons, and she’s the largest animal in the world. But she’s not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to equal about 40 Leviatha’s. So where is this behemoth?

Here, in Utah. Sorry, that’s too close. Here. This is Pando, whose name means “I spread out.” Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly 47,000 genetically identical clone trunks. Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a single organism. Pando is the clear winner of world’s largest organism by weight— an incredible 6 million kilograms.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
largest organism 2
pando grew 2


Important Words


  1. animal
  2. aspen
  3. attached
  4. behemoth
  5. belly
  6. blue
  7. call
  8. centimeter
  9. clear
  10. clone
  11. close
  12. closest
  13. crustacean
  14. enormous
  15. equal
  16. estimated
  17. fate
  18. genetically
  19. goliath
  20. grow
  21. identical
  22. incredible
  23. kilograms
  24. krill
  25. largest
  26. leviatha
  27. life
  28. means
  29. metric
  30. million
  31. organism
  32. pando
  33. quaking
  34. root
  35. roughly
  36. scientists
  37. sentence
  38. share
  39. single
  40. spread
  41. system
  42. today
  43. tons
  44. trunks
  45. utah
  46. weighs
  47. weight
  48. whale
  49. winner
  50. world