SOLUTIONS for Booth 1
Mashtots and his Avenue

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This exercise said: "The first booth of the Mashtots Avenue Festival is dedicated to Mesrob Mashtots himself, who invented the Armenian alphabet, and to the Avenue named after him. Here visitors will find information on Saint Mashtots, the Mashtots Matenataran and Mashtots Avenue."

Task: Find a photograph of the Avenue on the Internet and send us the URL of the page where it is located as well as a copy of the photograph itself as an email attachment.

Solution: An efficient way to find a photograph is to utilize a search engine, such as HotBot, which can detect if a web page includes a picture. This is done by checking the box labeled "image" found under the "pages must include;" heading.

Picture


Photograph of Mashtots Avenue from Internet site.

http://wotan.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~houssik/Window/yerevan2.html



Task: Find Web sites about the Matenataran.

Solution: There are several sites about the Madenataran on the Internet. One good example is the following page-

http://wotan.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~houssik/Window/madenataran.html

Task: We would like you to find the title of the following poem:
"Give me light, God irrefutable,
Inexplicable architect of the universe,
Creator of fate and recognition,
Tempest of breath, central ability,
The deacon of your Holy Table Mesrob,
For his great foggy dream
Pleads for lucidity from your hands! …"

its author, the name of the book from which it is taken, and the name of the translator from Armenian to English.

Solution: A search of the Internet using a meta search engine (one which submits the query to various search engines) reveals the location of the poem at -

http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/literatu/saint.html

From there we find that the title of the poem is "The Saint's Prayer" and it is from the book "Siamanto, Complete Works". It was written by Siamanto (Adom Yarjanian) and translated by Shant Norashkharian. The following is the translation in its entirety -


Task: Find the most popular way to spell "Mashtots" by searching for different variations of the name on the Internet. Tell us what search engine you used, and how many different pages were found for each version.

Solution: A search using AltaVista yielded the following results:


1) Mashtots 330
2) Mashdots 49
3) Mashtotz 30
4) Mashdotz 20
5) Machtots 12
6) Machtotz 4
7) Machdotz 2
8) Machdots 0

Pages utilizing the "ch" spelling are of French origin.