For better or worse, listening to an audio book almost always feels like a shared experience. I feel myself not merely a passive audience but engaged in a kind of exchange. Readers are not reading to me: we are reading together. I have a sense of continuous back-and-forth commentary, where I bounce my ideas off the readers' ideas, or what I perceive as their ideas from their intonation, mistakes, involuntary grunts, and sighs. This is precisely what alarms the sighted reader who thinks of reading as a private and intensely personal act. But I can't help myself. This way of thinking about reading comes from the habit of listening to people who read aloud to me. When husband reads to me, usually a big novel or epic, the text becomes a topic of conversation throughout the day. The initial impressions one has during the course of reading, the ideas one revises or rejects as reading continues, become our mutual property. We share the process of reading, a real-time event in the intimate space where ideas take shape. I require my writing students to turn in taped readings of their work. This is not only a convenience that allows me to return their work as quickly as a sighted teacher would. But reading their work aloud also makes the students more conscious of flaws in their prose. Frequently, I notice, they feel compelled to speak to me at the end of the tape, particularly after reading a longer piece of work. " I tried to do it another way first, but I think this works better, "they say. "Reading it over, I see the ending is kind of abrupt. "I don’t discount the possibility that these outpourings are staged pleas for me to go easy on them. But I also think there is something about having just read aloud for an extended time that makes them drop their guard. I sense they are not so much speaking to me as thinking aloud. I feel myself briefly invited into the mysterious space between the writer and the text. I imagine them sitting alone, in the circle of light cast by a solitary reading lamp. The text lies in their laps. Or they read it off the computer screen, their reading punctuated by occasional tap-tap-tap of the scroll command. Outside the circle of light, in the general darkness, I hover, a receiving presence. 1). In the first paragraph, the author mentions "intonations, mistakes, involuntary grunts, an sighs” in order to _______. A. suggest that unconscious expressions often betray one’s true opinions