Has anyone ever told you that eating carrots will help you see in the dark?
This is just one of many incorrect beliefs you may have heard. Below, a newspaper has picked out scientific explanations for three mistakes that people make about their eyes. Let's take a look.
Can eating carrots improve your eyesight?
Carrots are rich in vitamin A, which helps the eyes to turn light into information for your brain. This allows people to see in darker places.
However, eating more carrots won't help you see better. A certain amount will help, but a large number of carrots will not give you superhuman eyesight.
If your parents have bad eyesight, will you have bad eyesight, too?
Myopia (近视) can be passed from parents to children.
A study by the American Optometric Association found that if both parents are myopic (近视的), there's a 33 to 60 percent chance that their child will be. For children who have one parent with myopia, the chance is 23 to 40 percent, and it's down to 6 to 15 percent for kids with non-myopic parents.
So if your eyesight is bad, your children might still have good vision.
Do color blind people see the world in black and white?
Color blindness doesn't usually mean that people see the world like an old movie. They usually can't tell certain colors from each other, especially green and red. Another commonly confused (困惑的) pair of colors is yellow and blue.
Our eyes have cone cells (视锥细胞) that sense different wavelengths (波长) of light. If these cells don't work properly, color blindness happens.
There are different levels of color blindness. Some people are only color blind in low light. However, in the most serious form of color blindness, everything is shades of gray.
