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 making 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 Life
B．Struggle Against Difficulties
C．A Disaster Makes a Strong Person
D．An Unforgettable Experience
