MEDICAL ENGLISH ARTICLES

    Lesson by Daniel M. Abrams, animation by TED-Ed. Today, about one-tenth of the world’s population are southpaws . Why are such a small proportion of people left-handed -- and why does the trait exist in the first place ? Daniel M. Abrams investigates how the uneven ratio of lefties and righties gives insight into a balance between competitive and cooperative pressures on human evolution. Transcript If you know an older left-handed person, chances are they had to learn to write or eat with their right hand. And in many parts of the world, it's still common practice to force children to use their "proper" hand. Even the word for right also means correct or good, not just in English, but many other languages, too. But if being left-handed is so wrong, then why does it happen in the first place? Today, about 1/10 of the world's population are left-handed. Archeological evidence shows that it's been that way for as long as 500,000 years, with about 10% of huma...

  The average 20-year-old knows between 27,000 and 52,000 different words. Spoken out loud, most of these words last less than a second. With every word, the brain has a quick decision to make: which of those thousands of options matches the signal? And about 98% of the time, the brain chooses the correct word. How is this possible? Gareth Gaskell digs into the complexities of speech comprehension. [Directed by Art Shot, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by Stephen LaRosa]. TRANSCRIPT 0 0:06 The average 20 year old knows between 27,000 and 52,000 different words.   By age 60, that number averages between 35,000 and 56,000.   Spoken out loud, most of these words last less than a second.   So with every word, the brain has a quick decision to make:   which of those thousands of options matches the signal?   About 98% of the time, the brain chooses the correct word.   0 0:36 But how?   Speech comprehension is different from reading comprehensio...