大学英语精读第一册

don‘t change colour all time,and so your brain interprets the information your eyes give you.

3. Psychologists have found that people learn to understand and interpret

what they see easily.One psychologist tried an experiment on himself.He put on a special pair of glasses.When he looked through them everything he looked at seemed to be upside-down.Try and imagine how that feels.At first,if he saw something on a high shelf,he bent down to pick it up because his eyes told him that the object was near the floor.But in a few weeks,he learnt to understand the strange,new world he saw.He lived normally without walking into things.

4. Sometimes,however,we make mistakes.Look at the Necker Cube(内克尔

立方体)below.Is the shaded part of the cube at the back or at the front?

The Necker Cube

Now look at it for a few minutes.Does the shaded part seem to move?This is an example of a visual illusion.The Necker Cube shows us that when we see an object,we make the best interpretation of it that we can.But sometimes we are wrong.

5. The way we see things is therefore more complicated than we imagine.Our

eyes give us information all the time.But our brains decide what is important to us.For example,if you walk down a crowded street,you will see many faces.But you will probably not really notice them.But if you see someone you know,you will notice him immediately.From this example we can see that your brain chooses the visual information which is useful to you,and rejects the information which it does not need.The way your brain interprets that information depends on the knowledge you have about the world.And all this happens in less than a second.

Ⅰ.If you think a statement is false,make necessary changes to make it true.

1. When you catch sight of an object in the fair distance,you know

immediately from experience that it must be much bigger than it looks. 2. If you know the colour of any object,you won’t find it changes colour

in any circumstances,because your brain keeps telling you what colour

it is.

3. Your eyes send off “signals”constantly and your brain accepts them

and explains their meaning in its unique way.

4. When the psychologist put on a special pair of glasses,he found

everything had changed either in size or in position.

5. But in a few weeks the psychologist found everything had turned back

into its normal state.

6. Our eyes may make mistakes,causing optical illusions,but our brain

never will-it can always make a sound judgment.

7. We cannot always avoid having a visual illusion because things we are

more complicated than we think.

8. Our brain accepts or rejects the information our eyes provide

according to our actual needs.

9. The three questions raised at the beginning of the text are related

to the relationship between visual information and mental interpretation.

10. From the text we may infer that “perception”means “awareness

through senses(sense of sight,for example)of external(外部的)objicts”

ⅡWrite down the topic sentence of each paragraph in the blank space after the text