Feb. 18, 2004

Test Your Hearing

How keen are your ears? Here's a way to find out. You will need a watch that ticks. Place the watch in a quiet room. Move away from the watch until you can just barely hear the sound. This is your threshold distance. Check out the threshold distances of your friends and family.

You can change your threshold distance. Go into another room and listen to some fairly loud music or a TV for about ten minutes. Then go check your threshold distance again. Do you have to stand closer or farther away from the watch to hear it? How does the hearing of older people compare to kids' hearing?

As you lose your hearing, your ability to hear very high tones is the first to go. Here's how you can test this. Turn on a television set and turn the volume all the way down or put it on mute. Lean over the back of the set and listen for a soft, high-pitched whine. If you can hear it, you are listening to sound that is in the highest range of human hearing. Walk away from it to determine your distance threshold.

Test other members of your family and friends. Test people of different ages. In general, most older people will have lost the ability to hear these high sounds. How well do teenage rock-music fans do?

Reprinted with permission from Perk Up Your Ears: Discover Your Sense of Hearing by Vicki Cobb. Text © 2001 by Vicki Cobb (www.vickicobb.com). Published by Millbrook Press.

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