Ⅰ.阅读理解
(2014·湖北省八市三月调考)
I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a goods yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I can dimly remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity(大灾难) 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. In spite of the fact the adjustment is never easy, I had my parents and teachers to help. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. 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 selfconfidence 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 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 laughing at 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.
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 that 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.
文章大意：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。
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 calamity didn't happen
C.the calamity made the author appreciate what he had
D.the calamity strengthened the author's desire to see
答案：C 细节理解题。第一段最后一句指出“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)上摔下来，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.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 him.
答案：B 细节理解题。the most difficult thing是The hardest lesson的同义改写，故可定位到第二段。该段首句指出最困难的事情是“相信自己”，故选B。
3.For the author, the baseball and encouragement offered by the man ________.
A.hurt the author's feeling
B.made the author puzzled
C.directly led to the change of the author's career
D.inspired the author
答案：D 细节理解题。根据baseball定位到倒数第二段。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.故选D。
4.According to the passage, the author ________.
A.set goals for himself but only invited failure most of the time
B.thought that nothing was impossible for him
C.was discouraged from trying something out of reach for fear of failure
D.suggested not trying something beyond one's ability at the beginning
答案：D 推理判断题。最后一段第二、三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D正确。
