IELTS Reading

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READING PASSAGE 2

Answer Questions 11 – 20, which are based on the text below.


REMOVING UNWANTED NOISE
A A noisy restaurant, a busy road, or a windy day are all situations that can be
intensely frustrating for the hearing impaired when trying to understand what other
people are saying. Some 10 million people in the UK suffer from hearing difficulties and,
helpful as hearing aids are, those who wear them often complain that background noise
continues to interfere with their understanding. But what if hearing aid wearers could
choose to filter out all the troublesome sounds and focus just on the voices they want to
hear?
Engineer Dr Richard Turner believes that this is fast becoming a possibility. He is
developing a system that identifies the distracting noise and ‘rubs it out’. ‘The poor
performance in noise of current hearing devices is a major reason why six million people
in the UK who would benefit from hearing aids do not use them,’ he said. Moreover, as
the population ages, a greater number of people will be hindered by the inability to hear
clearly. In addition, hearing-impaired patients who have been fitted with cochlear
implants – devices implanted to help those whose auditory hair cells have died – suffer
from similar limitations.

B The solution lies in the statistics of sound, as Turner explained: ‘Many interfering
noises are immediately recognisable. Raindrops patter on a surface, a fire crackles,
talkers babble at a party and the wind howls. But what makes these different noises
sound the way they do? No two rain sounds are identical because the precise arrangement
of falling water droplets is never repeated. Nonetheless, there must be statistical
similarities in the sounds of these raindrops compared with, say, the crackle of a fire.’ He
believes that for this reason, the brain may be able to group similar types of sounds
together based on their specific characteristics.
Turner and his colleagues have analysed this process mathematically and then developed
algorithms that mimic what the brain is doing. The mathematical system that they have
developed is capable of being ‘trained’ – a process that uses new methods from the field
of machine learning – so that it can recognise new sounds. ‘Rather surprisingly, it seems
that a relatively small set of statistics is sufficient to describe a large number of sounds’
he says. Crucially, the system that Turner and his team have come up with is capable of
telling the difference between speech and other types of sound.

C ‘What we can now do is to erase background noise and pass these cleaned-up
sounds to a listener to improve their perception in difficult surroundings,’ said Turner.
The idea is that future devices will have several different modes in which they can
operate. These might include a mode for travelling in a car or on a train, a mode for
places like a noisy party or a busy restaurant, a mode that can be used outdoors in windy
weather, and so on. The device might intelligently select an appropriate mode based on
the characteristics of the incoming sound.
D ‘In a sense we are developing the technology to underpin intelligent hearing
devices,’ said Turner. An additional possibility would be for users to override the
selection made by the device and select a processing mode based upon what sorts of
noise they wish to erase. They could even guide the processing on their device using an
interface on a mobile phone through wireless communication. Turner anticipates that his
team will need two more years of simulating the effect of modifications that clean up
sound before they start to work with device specialists. ‘If these preliminary tests go well,
then we’ll be looking to work with hearing device companies to try to adapt their
processing in order to incorporate these machine learning techniques.’
E Tinnitus sufferers, who are plagued by a constant ringing in their ears, could also
benefit from the technology. At present, people with tinnitus sometimes use
environmental sound generators as a distraction from the ringing in their ears. But such
generators offer only a limited selection of sounds – a gently flowing stream, waves
lapping on the seashore, or leaves rustling. With the new technology, individual patients
could select the best sound to distract them from their tinnitus.
F The technology not only holds promise for helping the hearing impaired, but it also
has the potential to improve phone calls – anyone who has ever tried to hold a
conversation with someone phoning from a crowded room will recognise the possible
benefits of such a facility. Systems that can deal with unwanted audio content would also
be welcomed by the increasing numbers of people using video-sharing websites. For
example, a video containing a conversation that takes place by a busy roadside on a
windy day could be made more intelligible by isolating the speech from the noises –
users could even be offered the chance to de-noise their video during the upload process.
Questions 11 – 20
The text has six sections, A – F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i – ix, in boxes 11 – 16 below.

List of Headings
i How hearing loss may be caused by certain types of sounds
ii Uses for Turner’s research in media and communications
iii Creating a model for the classification of sounds
iv Potential developments that still require further research
v A drawback in the help currently available to those with hearing problems
vi Providing the hearing-impaired with training in new technology
vii A more effective way to take attention away from a hearing problem
viii Analysing the sounds produced in the process of speaking
ix The possibility of a hearing aid that can adjust itself to different environments

14 Section A ______
15 Section B ______
16 Section C ______
17 Section D ______
18 Section E ______
19 Section F ______
Questions 20-23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 17- 20 below.
Improving the performance of hearing aids
At present, many people find their hearing aids do not work well when there is
background noise. This also applies to people without hearing aids who have had
implants fitted to help with hearing loss. Dr Richard Turner is looking for a solution to
this problem. Although sounds are never 20……… , he believes they do share some
similarities.He and his colleagues have worked on a mathematical system using 21……..
which replicate how we hear sounds. To allow this system to be ‘trained’, they have
applied procedures used in machine learning and found that many different sounds can be
described using a limited number of 22……… . They have now developed a system that
can distinguish 23………. from other sounds.

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