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 slightly remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity(灾难) 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 totally confused 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 (崩溃) 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（确信） that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, 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. It had to start with the st things. 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 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.
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 successful variation 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:According to the passage, the baseball and encouragement offered by the man _____A．hurt the author's feeling.B．gave the author a deep impression.C．directly led to the invention of ground ball.D．inspired the author.小题5:What is the best title for the passage?A．A Miserable LifeB．Struggle Against DifficultiesC．A Disaster Makes a Strong PersonD．An Unforgetable Experience