I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me--a potential to live, you might call it--which I didn't see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt. "I can't use this." I said. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around." The words stuck in my head. "Roll it around! "By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
We can learn from the beginning of the passage that __________________.
A.the author lost his sight because of a car crash. |
B.the disaster strengthened the author's desire to see |
C.the disaster made the author appreciate what he had. |
D.the author wouldn't love life if the disaster didn't happen. |
What's the most difficult thing for the author?
A.Building up assurance that he can find his place in life. |
B.To find a special work that suits the author. |
C.Learning to manage his life alone. |
D.How to adjust himself to reality. |
According to the context, "a chair rocker on the front porch" in paragraph 3 means that the author
A.was paralyzed and stayed in a rocking chair. |
B.would sit in a rocking chair and enjoy his life. |
C.would sit in a chair and stay at home. |
D.would lose his will to struggle against difficulties. |
According to the passage, the baseball and encouragement offered by the man
A.inspired the author. |
B.hurt the author's feeling. |
C.gave the author a deep impression |
D.directly led to the invention of ground ball. |
According to the passage, which of the following is CORRECT?
A.The author set goals for himself but only invited failure most of the time. |
B.The author suggested not trying something beyond one's ability at the beginning. |
C.Because of his limitations, the author tried to reach one goal at a time. |
D.The bitterness of failure prevented the author from trying something out of reach. |