ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPHOST2024P5)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

Comic Books

Every ten years or so, critics suddenly discover that mainstream comics have grown up. __1__ as ‘graphic novels’ or ‘sequential art’, it’s now okay for the literati to be seen reading such puerile material – once they’ve learned how.

Of course, stories for adult readers have been around since the inception of strips and comics in the 1800s, but for the __2__ crop of graphic classics we have to thank the cartoonists who cut their teeth churning out the ‘trash mags’ of the 1950s and underground comix of the 1960s.

Then, in the 1970s, the underground met the overground when Art Spiegelman sat down with Will Eisner to talk futures. Out of these conversations came Maus and A Contract with God, two masterpieces which rank beside the works of Günter Grass and Charles Dickens, respectively. __3__ books of strips or compilations of magazines, the self-contained single-story comic book had arrived.

Spiegelman and Eisner crossed over into book shops. They edged the door open and in sneaked young guns like Joe Sacco (Palestine), the Hernandez Brothers (Love & Rockets), Alan Moore (From Hell) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), writer-artists who have taken the graphic __4__ into areas which would astonish those who still believe comics mean testosterone in tights. Trash mags now run the length of War and Peace and win Pulitzers.

But the medium is a labour of love. The work involved in filling a page is staggering by comparison with a page of text. The remuneration rarely matches all the writing and designing, drawing and inking, but the reward is a work of art which readers treat differently to a book with only a cover plate. Many keep their objects of beauty in plastic envelopes and repeatedly return to them, maybe just one page, for it is the visceral quality of the __5__ that compels.

Ian Gordon, New Internationalist

Mystery Script

Boasting illustrations of naked nymphs, unrecognisable plants, astrological diagrams and reams of text in an unknown alphabet, the Voynich manuscript has baffled and captivated researchers since book dealer Wilfred Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912.

Although its patterns of word lengths and symbol combinations seem similar to those of real languages, the most recent studies suggested that the book is a clever 15th-century hoax designed to dupe Renaissance book collectors, and that the words have no meaning.

Now Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester in the UK and colleagues have analysed the text using a technique that looks for word relationships that signify meaning. First Montemurro’s team used a formula to find the “entropy” of each term or word. This is a measure of how evenly distributed it is. For a given term, they calculated its entropy in the original text and in a scrambled version. The difference between the two entropies, multiplied by the frequency of the word, gives a measure of how much information it carries.

The idea is that information-rich words will appear more frequently, but also, as in real language, only appear in sections dealing with that topic, whereas low-information words such as “and” should be sprinkled throughout.

Montemurro’s team had already used the entropy approach in 2009 to home in on meaningful words in famous texts. For Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the top 10 most informative words identified by the formula included “species”, “variety”, “hybrid”, “form” and “genus”. In Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, the formula quite rightly flagged up “whale” as one of the most important words.

When applied to the Voynich texts, the formula picked out several high-entropy words. Unlike for Darwin and Melville, it is not known what those words mean, but they seemed to be specific to different sections of the manuscript, as in a real text.

The team also measured the relatedness of various Voynich words, based on how related words cluster in known languages. They found that the terms in what look like the pharmaceutical and herbal sections were more likely to be related to each other than to terms in sections apparently about astrology, biology and recipes. “Our analysis is the first that actually links these sections only by their linguistic structure,” Montemurro says.

To compare the Voynich text with specific, known languages, the team looked at another metric: the optimal way to divide a text into chunks so as to maximise the information value of each chunk. In novels or chapters that pertain to a certain topic, clusters of related, highentropy terms – known as scale domains – tend to be large, containing several hundred words. By contrast, in a simple list of citations, say, these domains would be much smaller.

The team calculated the optimal scale domains for texts of similar length to Voynich, written in several languages: On the Origin of Species (English), Records of the Grand Historian (Classical Chinese) and The Confessions of St Augustine (Latin), plus computer code in the Fortran programming language and sections of yeast DNA. This revealed “Voynichese” to be most similar to the human languages.

The findings have not convinced Gordon Rugg of Keele University, UK, a proponent of the hoax hypothesis. In 2004, he came up with a low-tech method by which a smart trickster could create the entire Voynich manuscript without first inventing a secret language. The hoaxer could have created a table of gibberish syllables representing a selection of invented roots, prefixes and suffixes, and then covered it with a piece of card containing three holes, moving it to read off new “words”. Using a selection of cards with different arrangements of holes would produce nonsense that looked like language.

Rugg says this method could produce several of the features Montemurro found. “You can have very simple processes that produce very complex outputs.” Such effort might have been warranted given the high prices that rare texts commanded among book collectors of the time, he adds.

The manuscript’s complete lack of corrections also makes Rugg suspicious. “If the Voynich manuscript contained a real language, either the person who wrote it didn’t care about mistakes, or he wrote 200 pages without making a mistake,“ he says. Both are unlikely.

Montemurro hopes to apply the technique for text analysis next to DNA and neural signals. This might help geneticists home in on valuable stretches of DNA and reveal whether different parts of the brain communicate in specific ways. A similar method could extract alien messages from background noise.

And even though Rugg thinks Voynich is a hoax, it will always have a special fascination, he says. “It’s like the most interesting whodunnit ever, and somebody’s ripped out the last three pages.” Lisa Grossman, New Scientist