Many people believe that the glare from snow causes snowblindness. Yet, dark glasses or not, they find themselves suffering from headaches and watering eyes, and even snowblindness, when exposed to several hours of "snow light".
The United States Army has now determined that glare from snow does not cause snowblindness in troops in a snow-covered country. Rather, a man's eyes frequently find nothing to focus on in a broad expanse of barren snow-covered terrain. So his gaze continually shifts and jumps back and forth over the entire landscape in search of something to look at. Finding nothing, hour after hour, the eyes never stop searching and the eyeballs become sore and the eye muscles ache. Nature offsets this irritation by producing more and more fluid which covers the eyeballs. The fluid covers the eyeball in increasing quantity until vision blurs, then is obscured, and the result is total, even though temporary, snowblindness.
Experiments led to the Army to a simple method of overcoming this problem. Scouts ahead of a main body of troops are trained to shake snow from evergreen bushes, creating a dotted line as they cross completely snow-covered landscape. Even the scouts themselves throw lightweight, dark colored objects ahead on which they too can focus. The men following can then see something. Their gaze is arrested. Their eyes focus on a bush and having found something to see, stop scouring the snow-blanketed landscape. By focusing their attention on one object at a time, the men can cross the snow without becoming hopelessly snowblind or lost. In this way the problem of crossing a solid white terrain is overcome.
6. To prevent headache, watering eyes and blindness caused by the glare from snow, dark glasses are _____.
(A) indispensable
(B) useful
(C) ineffective
(D) available
7. When the eyes are sore tears are produced to _____.
(A) clear the vision
(B) remedy snowblindness
(C) ease the irritation
(D) loosen the muscles
8. Snowblindness may be avoided by _____.
(A) concentrating on the solid white terrain
(B) searching for something to look at in snow-covered terrain
(C) providing the eyes with something to focus on
(D) covering the eyeballs with fluid
9. The eyeballs become sore and the eye muscles ache because _____.
(A) tears cover the eyeballs
(B) the eyes are irritated by blinding sunlight
(C) the eyes are irritated by blinding snow
(D) there is nothing to focus on
10. A suitable title for the passage would be _____.
(A) Snowblindness and How to Overcome It
(B) Nature's Cure for Snowblindness
(C) Soldiers in the Snow
(D) Snow Vision
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A growing world population and the discoveries of science may alter this pattern of distribution in the future. As men slowly learn to master diseases, control floods, prevent famines, and stop wars, fewer people die every year; and in consequence the population of the world is steadily increasing. In 1925 there were about 2,000 million people in the world; by the end of the century there may well be over 4,000 million.
When numbers rise the ex...[查看详情]
