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Directions: Please read the following passage within the limited time, and then do the exercise.
Length of Text: 300 words Time Allowed: 3.5 minutes
5.
Sigmund Freud
1 Do you often dream at night? Most people do. When they wake in the morning they say to themselves, "What a strange dream I had! I wonder what made me dream that."
2 Sometimes dreams are frightening. Terrible creatures threaten and pursue us. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. We can fly through the air or float from mountaintops. At other times we are troubled by dreams in which everything is confused. We are lost and can't find our way home. The world seems to have been turned upside down and nothing makes sense.
3 In dreams we act very strangely. We do things which we could never do when we're awake. We think and say things we could never think and say. Why are dreams so strange? Where do dreams come from?
4 People have been trying to answer this since the beginning of time. But no one has produced a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. One's dream-world seems strange and unfamiliar, he said, because dreams come from a part of one's mind which one can neither recognize nor control. He named this the "unconscious mind".
5 Sigmund Freud was born about a hundred years ago. He lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but ended his days in London, soon after the beginning of the Second World War.
6 Freud was one of the great explorers of our time. But the new worlds he explored were inside man himself. For the unconscious mind is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. These memories and feelings have been stored there from the moment of our birth--perhaps even before birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember or to dream dreams. Then suddenly we see a face we had forgotten long ago. We feel the same jealous fear and bitter disappointments we felt when we were little children.
7 This discovery of Freud's is very important if we wish to understand why people act as they do. For the unconscious forces inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Why do we choose one friend rather than another? Why does one story make us cry or laugh while another story doesn't affect us at all? Perhaps we know why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.
Comprehension Exercise