When I was a child in Sunday school, I would ask searching questions like "Angels can fly up in heaven, but how do clouds hold up pianos, and get the same puzzling response about how that was not important, what was important was that Jesus died for our sins and if we accepted him as our savior, when we died, we would go to heaven, where we’d get everything we wanted. Some children in my class wondered why anyone would hang on a cross with nails stuck through his hands to help anyone else; I wondered how Santa Claus knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I never wrote him a letter. Maybe he had a tape recorder hidden in every chimney in the world. This literal-mindedness has stuck with me; one result of it is that I am unable to believe in God. Most of the other atheists I know seem to feel freed or proud of their unbelief, as if they have cleverly refused to be sold snake oil. My husband, who was reared in a devout Catholic family, has served as an altar boy. So other than baptizing our son to reassure our families, we’ve skated over the issue of faith. Some people believe faith is a gift; it’s a choice, a matter of spiritual discipline. I have a friend who was reared to believe, and he does. But his faith has wavered. He has struggled to hang onto it and to pass it along to his children. Another friend of mine never goes to church because she’s a single mother who doesn’t have the gas money. But she once told me a day when she was washing oranges as the sun streamed onto them. As she peeled one, the smell rose to her face, and she felt she received the Holy Spirit. "He sank into my bones," she recounted. "I lifted my palms upward, feeling filled with love. " Being no theologian, and not even a believer, I am not in a position to offer up theories, but mine is this: people who receive faith directly, as a spontaneous combustion of the soul, have fewer questions. They have been sparked with a faith that is more unshakable than that of those who have been taught. From the first paragraph of the passage we know that ______.
A. the author was a Sunday school boy
B. the author used to be puzzled at many things
C. the school didn’t teach the children enough knowledge
D. tape recorders were popular in daily life
Psychologists have found that only about two percent of adults use their creativity, compared with ten percent of seven-year-old children. When five-year-olds were tested, the results soared to ninety percent! Curiosity and originality are daily occurrences for the small child, but somehow most of us lose the freedom and the flexibility of the child as we grow older. The need "to follow directions" and "do-it- right", plus the many societal constraints we put on ourselves, prevents us from using our creative potential. It is never too late to develop our creative potential. Some of us, however, find it difficult to think in imaginative and flexible ways because of our set pattern of approaching problems. When we are inflexible in our approach to situations, we close our minds to creative possibilities. Being creative doesn’t necessarily mean being a genius. It means looking at situations in a new way or putting something together in a new form that makes sense... Spontaneity is one of the key elements of creativity. If you were to ask someone, "What’s half of eight" and received the answer, "Zero," you might laugh and say, "That’s wrong!" But the figure 8 can be visualized as two zeros, one on top of the other; it can also be seen as two "3"s standing face to face. The ability to visualize our environment in new ways opens our perspective and allows us to make all kinds of discoveries. If each of us asked the question "Why" more often and investigated other alternatives to problem solving, our lives would be more interesting and exciting. "Being creative" means being able to ______.