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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 disaster 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 felt helpless 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 perch 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 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 successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball. The writer keeps setting goals for himself and ______.
A. has never tasted the bitterness of failure. B. has reached most of them
C. has only achieved some of them. D. has tried to reach them once and for all.

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 average I made progress.
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From the passage, we can infer that _______.A. lavender and citrus oils are seldom used in spas.B. Dallas and Dynasty are favorite topics for women in 2002.C. the spa industry develops very fast in recent years in the U. S.D. spas are becoming mainstream for the American super-wealthy.
As you slip into dreamtime, your mind visits a funny place indeed. It is the health spa of 1984. All around you, wealthy women lounge about sipping tea, nibbling low-calorie food, and indulging in treatments such as manicures, facials and massages. The country-club setting is quite exclusive. The pampered ones, pretty in their pink workout jumpsuits, are discussing the latest episodes of Dallas and Dynasty.
When the massage therapist whispers in your ear, you awake from the dream. Lo and behold, you’re in the Modem Spa of 2004. A warm feeling washes over you, and you smile. Reality is going to be better than the dream.
Today’s health spa is no longer for the super-wealthy. It’s gone mainstream, and the variety of treatments is mind-boggling. The spa industry has expanded like a sponge left soaking in a honey-papaya enzyme bath. The United States now boasts more than 12,000 spas, up from 1,374 in 1990. The International SPA Association reports that 45 million Americans visited spas from June 2002 to June 2003.
"Today spas are like Starbucks. They are everywhere. There is a flavor for every taste," said Melinda Minton, founder of The Spa Association, the largest of its kind in North America.
Joining the original destination and resort spas are fitness-club spas, medical spas, adventure spas and holistic spas. Spa Finder, a travel and marketing company that publishes Spa Finder magazine, now lists 30 special-interest categories on its Web site. The connoisseur can select from budget spas, beach spas, eco-spas, Pilates spas, spirituality spas, stop-smoking spas, vegetarian spas, yoga spas ... the list goes on. Pressed for time America now boasts 8,734 day spas where you can slip in for a quick treatment.