#3 - Audiologist: What is often considered age-related

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[manishatr]

I understand why B is right but, can you explain why E is wrong?

[Chandler H]

I understand why B is right but, can you explain why E is wrong?

Hi manishatr,

Sure! The audiologist is arguing that age-related hearing loss is actually due to long-term exposure to loud noise. The audiologist bases this assertion on the fact that remote, quiet populations have little to no age-related hearing loss.

Answer choice (E) tells us that people who work in loud environments don't wear ear protection unless they have to. There are a few issues with (E) that make it irrelevant to the stimulus. Most importantly, it does not mention age-related hearing loss. Also, we aren't talking about people who work in loud environments, like a construction site; more broadly, we are talking about people who live in loud environments like cities for their whole lives.

Does this make sense?

[pandapaws]

Hi I'm struggling a bit with understanding how the argument establishes that age-related hearing loss is actually due to long-term exposure to loud noise. I understand that hearing loss is due to long-term exposure to loud noise, but I can't see how the argument establishes that long-term exposure to loud noise is the cause of age-related hearing loss specifically.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi pandapaws,

The conclusion of this argument appears in the first sentence of the stimulus.

What this conclusion basically means is that much of the hearing loss in older people is actually caused by long-term exposure to loud noise rather than simply losing hearing due to old age (i.e. age-related hearing loss). In other words, a bunch of older people who complain about hearing loss incorrectly believe (or perhaps were even incorrectly diagnosed) that it is simply due to old age, just something that happens as we get older, couldn't have been prevented. etc..

The reason given for this conclusion is that in remote populations that have little exposure to loud noise, hearing loss in older people is very uncommon. In other words, the gist of the argument is that if what caused all these older people to have hearing loss was simply old age, then we'd expect that to generally happen to old people everywhere. The fact that it doesn't happen to old people everywhere suggests that it is not due to old age itself.

Of course, like most causal arguments, this argument is flawed because we do not know for certain that loud noise exposure is the definite cause of the hearing loss. For example, perhaps the reason that these remote populations have less hearing loss in older people has nothing to do with loud noises and instead is due to their diet, or their genes, etc..

The argument is not claiming that long term exposure to loud noise only causes age-related hearing loss, but that much of the so-called age-related hearing loss is just hearing loss caused by long term exposure to loud noise that is finally manifesting after all those years (i.e. long term).