primordial soup
2
8.6
- noun
- /prɪˈmɔːrdiəl suːp/
- Specialized
:
sopa primordial
- In the early Earth, the primordial soup contained the building blocks of life, including amino acids and simple sugars.
- primordial soup evolved
Maybe it's a digital primordial soup in which artificial life is bound to rise.
- Maybe it's a digital primordial soup in which artificial life is bound to rise.
- How, how do you get from a rock to an orangutan, you know, and, and our answer for that is primordial soup.
Examples
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A slowly cooking primordial soup seems inadequate to the task of producing the first life in the short times indicated by the geological record.
Academic text (1996) -
Some of the themes that the researchers discussed in the Frontiers of Science lecture series included the mystery of the snowball Earth, the chemistry of Earth's primordial soup, the explanation of how phylogenetic trees and DNA clocks operate, and the possibility of life on Mars.
Academic text (2001) -
Now it's time to move over and allow other, less destructive life forms to rise from the primordial soup and give it a try.
Blog text (17) -
You haven't eaten your primordial soup.
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And when they came back, they found amino acids formed spontaneously in that, in that primordial soup basically that they were creating.
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Naturally, the nuclear reaction rates in the primordial soup depend on the particle density, specifically the ratio of baryons to photons.
Academic text (2012) -
And as Orlando has taught us, if the aspiring writer is to benefit from an unearthly benefactor, it would not be an angel at all but a demon emerging from the primordial soup of the inkblot.
Academic text (2017) -
Scientific studies suggest that the primordial soup was crucial in forming the first living organisms on our planet.
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Researchers are investigating how the conditions of the primordial soup might have led to the emergence of complex life forms.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound combines 'primordial' (earliest/original) with 'soup' (a mixture), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer it refers to an early or original mixture. However, the specific scientific sense — the prebiotic solution from which life originated — is specialized and not fully predictable from the parts alone, so some prior exposure or domain knowledge is needed.
Etymology
Primordial soup paints a simple picture: primordial means very early and soup suggests a warm mix of chemicals in the Earth's first seas. Scientists used this picture to say the first simple parts of life formed in that chemical 'soup', so today the phrase means the early chemical mix 'from which life began'.