Vocabulary Comprehension - Words in Context

A. In each sentence, choose the best answer. The words in bold are from the passage.

1. If you discover something, you _______ it.
A) find
B) look for

2. A mysterious person loves to _______
A) tell jokes
B) keep secrets

3. Joe is a football expert! He _______
A) has never played
B) knows every rule

4. Stephenie Meyer is my favorite author. I have _______
A) read all of her books
B) watched all of her films

5. The word friendly means _______
A) rude
B) kind

6. Which of these is more likely to be handwritten?
A) a postcard
B) a business letter

7. My science notebook _______, but my math notebook is full of notes.
A) is empty
B) has writing on every page

8. If there are a number of activities for students to do after school, there are _______ activities.
A) many different
B) one or two

B. Answer the questions below. Discuss your answers with a partner

1. Would you rather send a handwritten letter or an email to your friends?
2. Who is your favorite author? Is he or she an expert in anything?
3. Would you rather be an expert in one subject or know a little about a number of subjects?

The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript¹

In 1912, book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought a number of books in Italy. He bought so many that he didn't look very closely at the books he was purchasing. When he got home, he discovered he had bought a very strange handwritten manuscript. It was written in a language he had never seen before. It was also full of pictures of plants.

Since then,the book-now known as the Voynich Manuscript-has become known as the world's most mysterious manuscript. It has been studied by many people, including professors, codebreakers, and language experts. However, no one has ever discovered its meaning or author

There are many ideas about who wrote it and why. Some people say that a famous scientist like Francis Bacon wrote it. Other people think it could be a religious text.² Some other people think the manuscript is a great hoax and doesn't mean anything at all.

Scientists have learned that the manuscript was made between 1404 and 1438. However, this only tells us how old the paper is, not when the book was written. But there's still hope that the manuscript is real and that there's meaning to its words.

The Voynich Manuscript remains a mystery today, but the pages are on the Internet if you would like to try to crack the code.