6月20日雅思考试阅读部分总结与建议

考试时间	话题内容	题型分析	试题难度
27/06/2009	1 交通 2 澳大利亚的鹦鹉 3 伏尼契手稿 (Voynich manuscript)	1 小标题对应/ T F NG 2 段落信息匹配/单选/填空 3 T F NG/人名理论配对/summary	★★★★

考试分析：6月的第四周的考试，从话题上来说覆盖了面很广，社会科学、自然科学和人文。其中考生普遍反映前面两篇文章尚算能够处理的范围内，但是最后一篇比较关于伏尼契手稿的破译文章比较难，考生对于人名理论题的把握较弱。需要警觉，多多操练。

词汇解析：

这次的考试涉及到了人文类的问题，这类型的文章一直是我们考生的弱项。所以我们这次就伏尼契手稿的话题，找了一篇文章，借此补充同学们的相关词汇以及背景知识。

 

manuscript [5mAnjuskript] n. 手稿, 原稿

Voynich Manuscript  伏尼契手稿

Script. [skript] n. 手稿, 手迹, 剧本, 考生的笔试卷, 原本

medieval [7medi5i:vEl] adj. 中世纪的, 仿中世纪的, 老式的, <贬>原始的

cipher [5saifE] n. 密码

antique [An5ti:k] n. 古物, 古董 adj. 古时的, 过时的

calligraphy [kE5li^rEfi] n. 书法

illustrated [5ilEstreitid] adj. 有插图的

telescope [5teliskEup] n. 望远镜

microscope [5maIkrEskEJp] n. 显微镜

spiral [5spaiErEl] a. 螺旋形的

galaxy [5^AlEksi] n. 星系, 银河

transcription [trAns5kripFEn] n. 抄写, 抄本

hoax [hEuks] n. 愚弄 v. 愚弄

dating [5deitiN] n. 测定年代

depict [di5pikt] vt. 描述, 描写

hypothesis [hai5pCWisis] n. 假设

 

文章介绍：

Voynich manuscript

Introduction

The Voynich Manuscript. is considered to be 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript. in the World'. To this day this medieval artifact resists all efforts at translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher.

The manuscript. is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953).

Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments, Wilfrid Voynich estimated that the Manuscript. was created in the late 13th century. The manuscript. is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages. It is written in an unknown script. of which there is no known other instance in the world. It is abundantly illustrated with awkward coloured drawings of:

• unidentified plants; 
• what seems to be herbal recipes; 
• tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts than hydraulic contraptions; 
• mysterious charts in which some have seem astronomical objects seen through a telescope, some live cells seen through a microscope; 
• charts into which you may see a strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people in rubbish bins.

No one really knows the origins of the manuscript. The experts believe it is European. They believe it was written between the 15th and 17th centuries.

From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich manuscript, and which is now stored in one of the boxes belonging with the Voynich manuscript. holdings of the Beinecke library, it is known that the manuscript. once formed part of the private library of Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus.

 

Solutions

When the manuscript. was first shown to expert cryptologists, they thought that solving it would be easy as the text was composed of "words", some of which were more frequent and occurred in certain combinations (Kahn, 1967). This soon turned out to be a mistake; the text could not easily be converted into Latin, English, German or a host of other languages which might possible be at the base of this document.

A first "solution" was announced in 1919, by William Romaine Newbold (Newbold, 1921), who caused a sensation by claiming that the manuscript. did indeed contain the work of Roger Bacon and that Bacon had known the use of the compound telescope and microscope, seeing the spiral structure of the Andromeda galaxy only visible with modern telescopes and cell structures unknown in the 13th Century. 

What Newbold discovered in the text was absolutely astonishing— enough to gather a lot of attention from the scientific community. The biological drawings in the text were described asseminiferous tubes, the microscopic cells with nuclei, and even spermatozoa. Among the astronomical drawings were the descriptions of spiral nebulae, a coronary eclipse, and the comet of 1273. One of the more baffling things about this was that many of the drawings of plants, and of the galaxies appeared to have been invented. There was no doubt that if Bacon were the author of such a text, he must have had some way of obtaining the information. 

For instance, Newbold's translation of the caption near the drawing of the nebula of Andromeda (which clearly shows its spiral characteristics), gave its location by the following:

The attempts to crack the code, however, were not over. In 1931, Mrs. Voynich took a photostat copy of the manuscript. to Catholic University in Washington where Fr. Theodore Petersen reproduced it photographically and started a complete hand transcription of the manuscript, with a card index to the words, and lists of concordances. The transcription alone was reported to have taken him 4 years. Unfortunately, it is not known what conclusion, if any, he reached.

In 1944, Hugh O'Neill, a renowned botanist at the Catholic University, identified various plants depicted in the manuscript. as New-World species, in particular an American sunflower and a red pepper (O'Neill, 1944). This meant that the dating of the manuscript. should be placed after 1493, when Columbus brought the first sunflower seeds to Europe. However, the identification is not certain: the red pepper is coloured green and the sunflower identification is equally contested.

Other people involved in the study of the manuscript. were prominent cryptologists such as W. Friedman and J. Tiltman, who independently arrived at the hypothesis that the manuscript. was written in an artificial, constructed language. This was based on the structure of the "words" as described below. Such artificial languages were devised at least a century after the probable date of the Voynich manuscript. Only the 'Lingua Ignota' of Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179) predates the Voynich manuscript. by several centuries, but this language does not exhibit the structure observed by Friedman and Tiltman, and it provides only nouns and a few adjectives.

Friedman came to know Petersen who at some time presented his hand transcription and other material to him. After Friedman's death, all the material was moved to the W.F. Friedman collection of the Marshall Foundation. Recently, electronic versions of the transcriptions made by Friedman's groups were produced from the typed sheets and made available on the Internet (Reeds, 1995).

Later acclaimed solutions see in the manuscript. a simple substitution cipher which can only decode isolated words (Feely, 1943), the first use of a more or less sophisticated cipher (Strong, 1945; Brumbaugh, 1977), a text in a vowel-less Ukrainian (Stojko, 1978) or the only surviving document of the Cathar movement (Levitov, 1987). No acceptable plaintext has ever been produced though.

Some interesting new insights into the manuscript. were provided in the 70's by Prescott Currier, presenting some of his results at an informal Voynich manuscript. symposium at the National Security Agency in Washington (D'Imperio, 1978). Basing his findings on the statistical properties of the text, he showed that the manuscript. is written in two distinct "languages" which he simply called A and B. Each bifolio was written in one of the two, and bifolios in the same "language" were generally grouped together. Only in the herbal section there is a mixture of A and B folios. Based on the characteristics of the writing, he showed that the manuscript. seems to have been written in two distinct "hands", and he even suggested there could be as much as five or even eight different hands. A significant feature is that the hand and language used on each folio are fully correlated. Currier's conclusion was that at least two people were involved in writing the Voynich manuscript, (which he considered a point against the "hoax theory" summarised below), although alternatively, the manuscript. could have been written by one person, in two distinct periods.

Due to the lack of success in the decipherment, a number of people have proposed that the manuscript. is a "hoax". The manuscript. could either be a 16th century forgery, to be sold for a hefty sum to emperor Rudolf II, who was interested in rare and unusual items (Brumbaugh, 1977, deriving from earlier unpublished theories), or a more recent one by W. Voynich himself (Barlow, 1986). The latter is effectively excluded both by expert dating of the manuscript, and by the evidence of its existence prior to 1887.

One problem with the earlier hoax theory is that, as will be shown, certain word statistics (Zipf's laws) found in the manuscript. are characteristic of natural languages. In other words, it is unlikely that any forgery from 16th century would "by chance" produce a text that follows Zipf's laws (first postulated in 1935).

Since 1990, a multidisciplinary group of varying size, generally between 100 and 200 individuals, dispersed all around the globe and connected through the Internet, has maintained an electronic mail forum on the decipherment of the Voynich manuscript. This has led to a lively exchange of ideas and the definition of two main goals: a machine readable transcription of the manuscript. text and the study of the text through numerical experiments.