TED talks are a great place to get English listening practice. They are much easier to understand than films because the speaker is explaining something and wants to be understood by everyone. And they are fundamentally interesting, too.

For people who give presentations, it’s very useful to see good quality presentations and speeches in English.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, was founded in 1984 and started putting free talks on-line in 2007. There are now over 1300.

TED and Meta TED

This article in Wired gives some background to the Power of Introverts talk by Susan Cain, which I linked to last week, and goes on to give lots of insights, past and present, into the TED-talk scene.

The part I found most interesting was about how the speakers prepare (and are prepared) for their talks. But don’t miss the video at the very bottom of the page of an imagined future TED-talk, directed by Ridley Scott, no less!