What is the main idea of the passage?

Attention is limited and aimed, so people can fail to see obvious things they are looking at. (The passage separates working eyes from failing attention and uses the beam comparison to explain the limit.)

What were the viewers asked to do while watching the video?

Count the passes made by the team in white. (The first sentence gives the task: counting the passes made by the team in white.)

Why does the writer say a driver who misses a motorcycle can be telling the truth?

Because the driver really did not perceive it, and we cannot notice the gaps in our own seeing. (The passage says we are blind to our own gaps, so the honest report of an empty road can still be sincere.)

In this passage, unrecorded describes something that:

passed through the visual field without being noticed or kept in mind (The word describes what crosses the visual field while attention is aimed elsewhere.)

The Gorilla You Missed: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

In one well-known experiment, viewers watch a short video of two teams passing a basketball and are asked to count the passes made by the team in white. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the game, faces the camera, beats their chest, and strolls away. About half of the viewers, counting carefully, never see the gorilla at all.

The finding is called inattentional blindness. The eyes work normally and the gorilla lands on the retina; what fails is attention. Attention behaves less like a lamp that lights a whole room and more like a narrow beam that has to be pointed somewhere. Whatever the beam is not on can cross the visual field unrecorded.

Viewers usually refuse to believe the result until they watch the clip a second time. That second reaction matters as much as the first. We are blind to the gaps in our own seeing, which is why a driver can look straight at a motorcycle, report an empty road, and be telling the truth.

Comprehension questions