高考阅读尝试出题.doc

According to a British news report, some blind people may finally get a chance to “see.” However, they are not learning to see with their eyes; they are learning to see with their ears. Dr. Peter Meijer, a scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, has developed a new system called the vOICe. The three middle letters in vOICe stand for “Oh, I see.” Meijer’s groundbreaking technology may change the lives of visually damaged people all over the world.
The vOICe system translates visual images(映像) from a camera into complex sounds. It then sends through headphones to a person these sounds. The program is based on the theory that people can hear certain sounds and learn to translate them into meaningful mental images. Miejer says that he is counting on the brain’s ability to adapt. “Our assumption here is that the brain is finally not interested in the information carrier—here, sound—but only in the information content,” he explains.
To judge the new system’s effectiveness, a number of visually damaged people were chosen to test the vOICe. Each tester was given a system, a system consisted of a head-mounted camera, stereo headphones, and a laptop computer. Testers reported that everything in the environment had its own unique sound. Bright areas were louder than dark areas and the height of an object or person could be determined by pitch(音高). The vOICe users just had to learn which sound went with which object. The system even came equipped with a color identifier that spoke color names.
Within two weeks most people who experiment with the vOICe system are able to identify objects such as walls and doors. They are also able to make out certain situations, including whether the lights in a room are on or off. Over time some users have been learned to “watch” television or track the outlines of buildings as they walk. Meijer thinks that translating will eventually become automatic for many users of the vOICe, bringing a form of image to them for the very first time.