Just stumbled across this site, which was apparently inspired by an xkcd feature.

The challenge is, can you describe a complex idea using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language? The editor will highlight a word that isn't on the list. I'll allow you to include the subject in your copy, even if it isn't on the list.

Gravity

Things made up of stuff pull on one another – this is called gravity. Gravity always pulls things together: it never pushes them away from one another.

There are two reasons why this pull can be big or small. The first is how much stuff the things have in them – the more stuff, the stronger the force. The second is how far away they are from each other – if they are close, then the pull is stronger.

Double entry Book-keeping

The key in book keeping is everything must match - for everything which comes in, something must go out.

So if we spent some money on a dog, we are adding how much a dog is, to what we own. But we are also taking that much from the money we had before. So the dog came in, and the money went out.

English football

There are twenty teams in the top group but most people seem to follow one of the big red teams and one of them ends on top every year. There used to be just three big red teams but now there are five, even though two of them are blue and have lots of money and one of the red ones still has lots of money but is far less big than it was. Every two years a team in white made up of people from the five big red ones goes away somewhere in the summer and loses a match on spot kicks.

OK who wants to attempt the offside trap?

The Ulster Question

We hate them and they hate us. Everyone who isn't one of us is one of them. Except the do good ones and the Greens.

Every year there is a fight to see who is best. Then we all watch the same big red teams play on the box.

Why can't we let them head off somewhere far away for good? With the one from you two too. Then all the World who love music would be happy.

Except the one who is good at hitting a little white ball into a cup.

And the one from cold feet. They can stay.

When you draw a relationship between two things, the line can go up or down. How fast it does so at each point is called the derivative. The line won't usually be straight, but you can put a straight line against it so it just touches, and the derivative is how fast this straight line goes up or down. To find it, put two points on your line, find how far they are from each other up, then put this over how far they are from each other along. Then let one point get nearer and nearer to the other. The number you get will get nearer and nearer to something, and that something is the derivative.

Being a person who does not eat animals

In most of the world, people usually eat some things that grow in the ground and some animals. Some people think it is not a good idea to eat animals. There can be many reasons for this. Some people think the animals can feel pain or fear so it is not nice to kill them. Some people worry that if they eat animals they will not live a long time because eating too many animals can be bad for your heart. Some people think we do not have enough space to eat animals because you need more space to grow an animal than to grow a tree or other food that is not an animal. There are also some gods which say people can not eat animals, although these usually say they can eat some animals but not others (which is strange). Whatever reason people have for not eating animals, this can be a hard life to live. The people who like to eat animals often think the people who do not like to eat animals are strange. They will tell them often that the animals smell very good to eat. They will say that the people who do not eat animals will be sick if they do not eat animals (even though this is not true, I have not eaten animals for twenty one years and I am not sick at all). If the people who do not eat animals go out to a nice place to eat, they will see that there is only one thing they can eat, and it does not look very nice, but for the people who eat animals there are twenty different things they can eat. In some places, a food that looks like it has no animals in, will actually have very small, pink pieces of animal and the owner will be surprised and say "But a small, pink piece of animal is not really an animal". The person who does not eat animals will be angry and say "Yes it is". This is not very fun.

I don't have any complex ideas.

In foot ball, you must not stand too far forward and then take part in play. Being too far forward means being nearer the other side's end than any of them, except one. You may run behind the other side after someone kicks the ball there, but you must not wait there for the ball to be kicked to you. If the other side are very quiet they can move forwards themselves while you're not looking, leaving you too far forward without knowing you are. This is called the offside trap.

If the ball hits one or more of the three big sticks behind you, so that it knocks off one of the two little ones, you're out. You're also out if you hit the ball and one of the other side catches it before it hits the ground, or if you run towards the other end and they get the ball there first. But the hardest one is this. If the ball hits you, but would have hit one of the three big sticks, you're out. But this is the hard bit: the ball must have hit the ground either between your sticks and the ones at the other end, or outside that line in the direction you're looking. And what's more, either it must have hit you along that line, or you must not have been really trying to hit it.

'Shrug', but not 'shape'? Really?

Quantum mechanics

Some things are very small so we can't see them. But my friend who is a teacher says some of them move in a wave and others don't. I still don't get this even though we did it at school for about four years. But the teacher then said I got the right answer to add up so I passed. I wasn't good at school where you had to make things move or grow. Or catch fire. Which was not good where I lived.

A third teacher who looks a bit like the first one was on the box last year. He agreed with him using another box full of water and some money. It was made of glass I think.

And it's allowing but not (but I guess that's just a quirk of the programme)

Grading examinations

Lots of people answer the same questions. Their answers to the questions are checked by other people who give them marks.

We use letters to show if someone wrote a lot of right (or very good) answers or not, and got a lot of marks. We also use the letters to show if someone's answers for the questions this year are as good as another person's answers for the different questions asked last year.

The letter A is usually the best, and it is given if someone gave a lot of right or good answers, and got a lot of marks. Other letters are used for not getting as many marks, or if the answers were not good enough to pass.

We need to decide how many marks are needed from each person's answers to get each of the letters. For each letter we look for the lowest mark for this year's questions, for which the answers are as good as the lowest mark that got the same letter last year.

I wonder what the thousand and first most frequently used word is?

It isn't that some things move in waves and others don't. Everything is a wave, in a way. It's just that there are some kinds of waves that can't be in the same place at the same time, and those kinds are what make up us and the stuff in the world. Other kinds of waves, such as the ones that make up light, can easily be in the same place at the same time, so they are not really "stuff" in the same way.

Let's say someone's written something down. By reading what they have written down in the right way, a way that people from, well, not Nice, but the land that Nice is in have thought of, we can work out what they think about everything. This works even for things they haven't written about. This works even if they don't know they think these things. This even works if it means us saying they think one thing, then five minutes later saying they think something else. That's all fine, as long as we say it in this way I've been talking about, with lots of very long words I may not use here. There is nothing other than the thing that someone has written down--not even the someone! This is what deconstruction is.

Humans live in many different places and act in different ways. Often when they live together in a group the people in that group want them all to act or look the same way so that everyone knows they are part of that group and not the other group that lives next door or down the road. When different groups live close together some of the things they do or say or wear may look almost the same, but when they live far away from each other these things may become more different. Some people think that if we visit other people who live far away we can learn more about what it means to be human. There are some things that all humans do (or all humans that we have looked at so far). We all speak, we all make fire and music, and we all change our hair. But many other things that we think are part of being human are different in different places. We do not all have the same ideas about mothers and fathers or love or death or what it means to be a good or bad person. When you first see people from a different place, the way they act or think may seem strange. If you spend a long time with them though, the way they live may begin to make more sense. If you live with far away people for more than a year, learn to speak how they speak, write a book with lots of long words about the time you spend living with them, and then talk to lots of other people about your ideas, then you are an anthropologist.

God

Does not exist.