为了提高广大学生的英语水平，提高英语专业学生的专四通过率，特提供以下英语阅读理解及答案详解：
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.
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.
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. To find a special work that suits the author.
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. was paralyzed and stayed in a rocking chair.
C. would lose his will to struggle against difficulties.
D. would sit in a chair and stay at home.
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.
5. 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. The bitterness of failure prevented the author from trying something out of reach.
D. Because of his limitations, the author tried to reach one goal at a time.
【文章概要】
本文讲述一位盲人因一次意外事故失明后如何克服困难，重新定位自己，取得人生价值的故事。第1段叙述作者因一次意外事故失明，但失明没有使他丧失对生活的信心，反而让他更懂得珍惜他所拥有的东西;第2—4段讲述他如何走出阴影，最终找到了自己的位置，并发明了滚球 (ground ball);最后一段总结他的成功经验，即在生活中不断给自己设立目标并为之而奋斗。
【答案解析】
1.[C]细节判断题。第l段最后一句指出“所失去的让我更懂得珍惜现在拥有的”，故选C。作者失明是因为他从一辆货车(box car)A摔下来，而不是因为汽车事故，故排除A;B的推断没有原文依据;文中提到他渴望重见光明。D的表述与原文有出入。
2.[B]细节判断题。the most difficult thin9是The hardest lesson的同义改写，故可定位到第3段。该段首句指出最困难的事情是“相信自己”，But所在的句子做了更具体的解释即“对自己的一种坚信，我还是 我，尽管不是完美的……坚信自己可以找到一个适合自己的位置”，故选B。A太笼统;由第2段可知他的生活并不是孤单的，他还有父母、老师等的支持，故C错 误;D文中没有提到。
3.[C]句意理解题。本题可用排除法。第3段第3句提到，“如果我不坚信自己，我会崩溃，变成一个坐在轮椅里的废人了，在门廊前度此余生”，由此可知C正确。
4.[D]细节判断题。根据baseball定位到倒数第2段。从该段最后两句可知棒球和那个男人的鼓励给作者以启示和鼓舞.从而发明了一种叫“滚球”的运动，故选D。该段提到作者以为那个男人是在嘲讽他，但后来在他的激励下有所启发，故A错误;B“给作者留下了深刻印象”在文中没有提及;C中的directly错误，男人的话只是给了作者启发。
5.[B]细节判断题。最后一段第2、3句表明我们要意识到自己的局限性，在开始时尝试那些遥不可及的东西只会徒劳无益，故B正确;由该段第1句和最后一句可知作者为自己不断设立目标并实现了大部分的目标，故A错误：最后一句的anyway but可知C错误;文中并没有指出他每次尝试一个目标是因为他自己的局限，故D属干随意捏造。