小站备考
托福
托福听力
Official15听力真题

托福official15听力lecture3 Palimpsest原文解析+翻译音频

展开
Tip:单击查看句义;划选/双击查生词

[00:00.00]Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.
[00:07.52]MALE PROFESSOR: Now, in Europe, in the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing and the printing press, all books, all manuscripts, were handmade. And the material typically used for the pages was parchment, which is animal skin that’s stretched and dried under tension so it becomes really flat and can be written on.
[00:27.82]During the 1400s, when printing was being developed, paper became the predominant material for books in Europe, [00:35.29]but prior to that, it was parchment. [00:38.22]Parchment is durable—much more so than paper. And it could be reused, which came in handy since it was a costly material and in short supply. [00:48.74]So it wasn’t uncommon for the scribes, or monks, who produced the manuscripts—[00:53.34]uh remember, before printing, books were made mainly in monasteries—[00:57.73]well, the scribes often recycled the parchment that’d been used for earlier manuscripts.
[01:03.63]They simply erased the ink off the parchment and wrote something new in its place. [01:09.37]A manuscript page that was written on, erased, and then used again is called a palimpsest.[01:15.99]Palimpsests were created ⋯ well, we know about two methods that were used for removing ink from parchment.
[01:24.79]In the late Middle Ages, it was customary to scrape away the surface of the parchment with an abrasive, which completely wiped out any writing that was there. [01:34.76]But earlier in the Middle Ages, the original ink was usually removed by washing the used parchment with milk. [01:42.52]That removed the ink, [01:44.85]but with the passing of time the original writing might reappear. In fact, it might reappear to the extent that scholars could make out and even decipher the original text.
[01:56.86]Perhaps the most famous example is the Archimedes palimpsest.[02:01.90]Archimedes lived in Greece around 200 B.C.E. ⋯ [02:06.78]And as you probably know, he's considered one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, [02:12.13]even though many of his writings had been lost, including what many now think to be his most important work, called the Method.
[02:21.53]But in 1998, a book of prayers from the Middle Ages sold at an art auction for a lot of money, more money than anyone would pay for a damaged book from the twelfth century, beautiful or not. Why? [02:34.83]It had been discovered that the book was a palimpsest, and beneath the surface writing of the manuscript lay—guess what?[02:42.60]—mathematical theorems and diagrams from Archimedes.[02:46.93]Archimedes’ writings were originally done on papyrus scrolls. [02:53.95]Then in the tenth century, a scribe made a copy on parchment of some of his texts and diagrams, including as it turns out, the Method. [03:01.44]This was extremely fortunate since later on, the original papyrus scrolls disappeared.
[03:08.39]About 200 years later, in the twelfth century, this parchment manuscript became a palimpsest when a scribe used the parchment to make a prayer book. So the pages, the pieces of parchment themselves had been preserved, but the Archimedes text was erased and written over, and no one knew it existed.
[03:28.79]It wasn't until 1906 that a scholar came across the prayer book in a library and realized it was a palimpsest, and that the underlying layer of text could only have come from Archimedes. [03:41.05]That was when his work the Method was discovered for the first time.
[03:45.33]Uh, the palimpsest then went through some more tough times, but eventually it ended up at an art auction, where it was bought and then donated to an art museum in Baltimore for conservation and study. [03:59.23]To avoid further damage to the manuscript, the research team at the art museum has had to be extremely selective in the techniques they use to see the original writing.
[04:09.42]They've used ultraviolet light and some other techniques, and if you are interested in that sort of thing, you can learn more about it in an art conservation class.[04:17.91]But, actually, it was a physicist who came up with a method that was a breakthrough. [04:22.56]He realized that the iron in the ancient ink would display if exposed to a certain x-ray imaging method. [04:29.77]And except for small portions of the text that couldn't be deciphered, this technique’s been very helpful in seeing Archimedes’ texts and drawings through the medieval overwriting.

1.What is the lecture mainly about?

你的答案:
正确答案:B
题目解析:
 后才能查看题目解析,还没有账号? 马上注册
讲座开篇介绍了羊皮纸的他点及重写本的创造方法,第二种方法做的重写本一段时间后原本的自己又重现,甚至重现到可以辨认的程度。接着用阿基米德的重写本作为例子来说明

学习页面

Medi

terr

anean

加强 + 政府 + 名词后缀

加强的政府——管理

原文例句

加入生词

本文生词 0

色块区域是你收藏过的生词;

查询次数越多,颜色越深哦~

显示文中生词

登录后才能收藏生词哦,现在登录注册>

本文重点词 45

文中加粗单词为本文重点词;

根据词频与核心词范围精心挑选,托福考试必掌握词汇。

显示文中重点词
学习本文词汇

文中划选/双击的生词、加粗重点词已收纳至词盒

可随时点击词盒查看哦~

只有在词句精学模式下才能开启词盒功能哦~

我知道了

词盒
收藏
笔记
我的笔记
5000
保存
反馈