I lost my sight when I was four by falling off a box car in a freight（货物）yard in Atlantic City. Now I am thirty two. I can slightly remember what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a disaster can do strange things to people. I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. 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 constant adjustments to reality. The adjustment is never easy. I was totally confused and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself, I mean: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the intricate（错综复杂的） pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was fun of 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 new kind of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good trying for something that I knew at the start was out of reach. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
小题1:We can learn from the beginning of the passage that _______A．the author lost his sight because of a car crash.B．the author wouldn’t love life if the disaster didn’t happen.C．the disaster made the author appreciate what he had.D．the disaster strengthened the author’s desire to see.小题2:What’s the most difficult thing for the author?A．How to adjust himself to reality. B．Building up assurance that he can find his place in life.C．Learning to manage his life alone.D．How to invent a new kind of baseball.小题3:According to the context, “a chair rocker on the front porch” in paragraph 3 means that the author _________.A．would sit in a rocking chair and enjoy his life. B．would be unable to move and stay in a rocking chair.C．would lose his will to struggle against difficulties.D．would sit in a chair and stay at home.小题4:What is the best title for the passage?A．A Miserable LifeB．Struggle Against DifficultiesC．A Disaster Makes a Strong PersonD．An Unforgettable Experience