full transcript

From the Ted Talk by TED-Ed: Will there be another pandemic in your lifetime?

Unscramble the Blue Letters


There are several ways to answer this question.

You could look at hsortiy. A team of ssnietitcs and engineers who took this approach catalogued all dmoecunetd epidemics and pandemics between 1600 and 1950. They used that data to do two things. First, to graph the likelihood that an oarutebk of any size pops up somewhere in the world over a set period of time. And second, to estimate the lhoioekild that that outbreak would get large enough to kill a certain pegantcere of the world's population. This graph shows that while huge pandemics are unlikely, they're not that unlikely. The team used these two distributions to estimate that the risk of a COVID-19-level pandemic is about 0.5% per year, and could be as high as 1.4% if new diaseses emerge more frequently in the future.

Open Cloze


There are several ways to answer this question.

You could look at _______. A team of __________ and engineers who took this approach catalogued all __________ epidemics and pandemics between 1600 and 1950. They used that data to do two things. First, to graph the likelihood that an ________ of any size pops up somewhere in the world over a set period of time. And second, to estimate the __________ that that outbreak would get large enough to kill a certain __________ of the world's population. This graph shows that while huge pandemics are unlikely, they're not that unlikely. The team used these two distributions to estimate that the risk of a COVID-19-level pandemic is about 0.5% per year, and could be as high as 1.4% if new ________ emerge more frequently in the future.

Solution


  1. outbreak
  2. scientists
  3. documented
  4. percentage
  5. diseases
  6. likelihood
  7. history

Original Text


There are several ways to answer this question.

You could look at history. A team of scientists and engineers who took this approach catalogued all documented epidemics and pandemics between 1600 and 1950. They used that data to do two things. First, to graph the likelihood that an outbreak of any size pops up somewhere in the world over a set period of time. And second, to estimate the likelihood that that outbreak would get large enough to kill a certain percentage of the world's population. This graph shows that while huge pandemics are unlikely, they're not that unlikely. The team used these two distributions to estimate that the risk of a COVID-19-level pandemic is about 0.5% per year, and could be as high as 1.4% if new diseases emerge more frequently in the future.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations




Important Words


  1. answer
  2. approach
  3. catalogued
  4. data
  5. diseases
  6. distributions
  7. documented
  8. emerge
  9. engineers
  10. epidemics
  11. estimate
  12. frequently
  13. future
  14. graph
  15. high
  16. history
  17. huge
  18. kill
  19. large
  20. likelihood
  21. outbreak
  22. pandemic
  23. pandemics
  24. percentage
  25. period
  26. pops
  27. population
  28. question
  29. risk
  30. scientists
  31. set
  32. shows
  33. size
  34. team
  35. time
  36. ways
  37. world
  38. year