You are going to read a newspaper article about the fifteenth-century Italian artist, Leonardo da Vinci.

Choose from the list A-l

the sentence which best summarises each part (1-7) of the article. There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.
There is an example at the beginning (0).
A Leonardo was working towards a final objective.
B People at the time often copied Leonardo’s ideas.
C Leonardo seems to have been more interested in ideas than in achievements.
D Later scientists were not able to take advantage of Leonardo’s discoveries.
E Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time.
F Leonardo preferred to work things out for himself.
G Leonardo preferred not to share his ideas with others.
H Leonardo left the task of completing his life’s work to others.
I People now recognise that Leonardo was a unique person.

THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME

A recently published book names Leonardo da Vinci as the world’s first, and possibly greatest, scientist
0I
The sixteenth-century Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci must be one of the greatest men who has ever lived. He is best
remembered as a painter and a sculptor, but the extent of his abilities in other areas of knowledge is still a source of
astonishment to scholars today. A recently published book describes him as the world's first real scientist and shows just how
great his achievements really were.
1
Leonardo's imagination was so vivid, his thirst for knowledge so powerful, that he dreamt up inventions that, at the time,
seemed quite impossible. He produced drawings, plans and diagrams of pieces of equipment which have come into being only
in the last hundred years or so. For example, he worked out the principles for a parachute, a diving suit, contact lenses and the
camera, long before the world was ready for them.
2
What drove Leonardo was his desire for information. Rather than accept what people at the time could understand and
explain, he looked for a new understanding of how nature worked, gained through observation and experiments.
3
Leonardo's ideas remained largely unpublished and unknown for years after his death, however. Meanwhile, other people,
ignorant of his findings, struggled to make the discoveries described in his notebooks all over again. If his ideas had been
common knowledge, western science might have progressed much faster. For example, he had sketched designs for a telescope
one hundred years before Galileo came up with the same idea.
4
Although Leonardo was a very good painter, and was in great demand, he was more interested in his experiments. He wrote
details of these, in no particular order, in his notebook. From time to time, he attempted to get all these notes into order. What
he aimed to do eventually was to make an encyclopaedia that would contain the sum of human knowledge. This he couldn't
finish, however, because he was always too busy adding to it.
5
By nature, Leonardo was a secretive man and always suspicious that others might steal his ideas. So from the beginning, his
notebooks were written in various codes, including one known as mirror writing, where the words are written in such a way
that they can only be read in a mirror. Although Leonardo's discoveries destroyed many theories which existed at the time,
unfortunately, few of them came to light during his lifetime.
6
And, what's more, all was nearly lost when he died in 1519. He entrusted the job of sorting out his notes to a young man called
Francesco Melzi. But the task was beyond his capabilities. Melzi's son, who inherited them, was equally unable to cope and
abandoned them in an attic cupboard. When the notebooks were eventually rediscovered, there were 13,000 pages remaining,
containing 1,500 diagrams and anatomical drawings. Some had, however, already been lost to treasure hunters. The pages are
now divided between museums and libraries all over Europe.
7
One of the great mysteries of Leonardo's character is that he started so much and finished so little. Only a handful of his
paintings were completed, few of his inventions were ever made and the books he aimed to write remained unpublished. It's
almost as if he was involved in so many investigations, which led him on to even more unanswered questions, that he was
never able to call a halt. Towards the end of his life, he must have realised that the world of nature was too large and too
complicated for even a brain like his to fully understand.