Passage Two
When Louis Braille was three years old, he became blind in both eyes as the result of an accident in his father’s shop. His father, determined that Louis should not suffer the usual fate of blind persons at that time and become a beggar, kept him in the village school until he was ten and then entered him in the Institution des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris. Louis learned to read from the three books engraved in large raised letters in the Institution library, did brilliantly well both in academic work and at the piano, and was soon help ing to teach the younger children.
In 1819, the same year that Louis entered the Institution, Charles Barbier, an army captain, reported to the Academy of Sciences on a system of raised dots and dashes which enabled soldiers to read messages in the dark. Later, Barbier brought his invention to the Institution. After experimenting with it, young Braille produced a writing system using only dots, from which he gradually devised 63 separate combinations representing the letters in the French alphabet. (at the request of an Englishman, he later added “w”), accents, punctuation marks, and mathematical signs. Although government prevented immediate offi cial adoption, his system was used at the Institution as long as the director, Dr. Pignier, was in office. The new director insisted on returning to the officially approved former system, but students continued to use Braille’s method secretly. Eventually, its superiority was established and it was adopted throughout France.
Charles Barbier originally devised his writing system for ______.
A、 blind children
B、 military personnel
C、 the French government
D、 the Academy of Sciences
【正确答案】：B
