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Read the text. Choose from choices the one which best fits each space (1-5). There are two choices you do not need to choose.

Mysterious 15th Century Manuscript

Dated to the 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is a hand-written text in an unknown script, ______(1).Since its discovery in the 19th century, many historians and cryptographers, including code breakers during the Second World War, have attempted to work out its meaning but _____(2).

Now, computer scientists at the University of Alberta have applied artificial intelligence to the manuscript, with their first goal to establish its language of origin. They used the text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 380 languages to “train” their system and then ran their algorithms, which determined ______(3).

Professor Kondrak, who led the research, and his graduate student Bradley Hauer were able to decipher a relatively high number of words using Hebrew as their reference language. “It turned out that over 80 per cent of words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know _____(4),” said professor Kondrak.

The scientists then used Google Translate _____(5), which read: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” “It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense,” said professor Kondrak.

The results of his work were published in the journal Transcriptions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

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