阅读理解。
Solomon Shereshevski was a man with an amazing memory. He was one of the world's most famous
me-monists (记忆能手). Born in Russia in about 1900, he spent much of his life performing memory
skills that people found difficult to believe. He could memorize long lists of numbers after reading them
through once, and he could then recite them forwards or back-wards. He could also remember the same
numbers months later. He could easily remember lists of names, dozens of playing cards or hundreds of
cities.
Although he had a wonderful memory, he found some normal skills very difficult. For example, he
found it difficult to learn to read. He also found it difficult to recognize patterns in words or numbers.
When presented with a long list of numbers like this: 1234 4231 5678 8765 6789 9876 he could not
see that there was a pattern. If he could see or hear a collection of numbers, he could remember it.
However, this did not mean that he could understand what he was looking at. He could remember long
complex mathematical formulas, but could not understand what the numbers meant.
Solomon suffered from a condition known as Synaesthesia. This meant that all of his senses were
connected in a special way. In other words, when he heard a particular word he also experienced a
unique taste, or saw a unique color. Each word that he heard brought a particular description into his
mind. Each word for him was unique, because he remembered it as a taste, a smell, a color or a sound,
or all of them together.
He was not a clever man except this ability and people found him rather stupid. He found it difficult to
become friends with other people because his mind was so different. In a way, his memory was a curse (祸根). He remembered everything, and that made it difficult for him to understand anything.
1. We know from the first paragraph that ____.
A. all of his life, Solomon was kept busy doing memory tricks
B. if Solomon read a list of numbers he could immediately remember them
C. Solomon could memorize long list of numbers and found their patterns
D. people thought Solomon could remember the most things in the world
2. Solomon had very powerful memory, but he _____.
A. could not read or write
B. never knew what people meant when they said to him
C. could not work out some simple math problems
D. found everything he did was meaningless
3. When a person suffers from Synaesthesia, he (or she) _____.
A. senses things usually in a wrong way
B. confuses feelings with c61ors or tastes
C. often connects words he (or she) hears with things he (or she) experienced
D. each word he (or she) hears changes its meaning completely
4. The author wants to express an idea that _____.
A. one cannot be good at both memorizing and understanding things
B. some people are actually quite stupid though they seem clever
C. having a good memory does not mean having good intelligence
D. the more you can memorize, the more stupid you will certainly be
