Intermediate Reading Comprehension 12

Exercise 1

Eight sentences have been left out of the following article. Read the text and put the sentences at the end into the right places - but be careful, one of the given sentences is not needed. The first one has been done to help you.

Why do we need two ears?

1) E
Even if you only had one ear that worked properly, you would still hear sounds and understand them. Having two ears helps us find out more about what is going on around us.

2) _____
Ears act as direction finders because sounds arrives at one ear before it reaches the other ear. Your brain measures the difference and automatically works out the direction of the sound.

3) ______
As we grow up, we get better at working out where a noise is coming from and how far away the thing making the noise is.

4) _____
They had to be able to track animals to hunt food. They also had to know which way to turn when large animals were tracking them.

5) _____
Bats, for instance, use echo-location to find their way in the dark. But directional hearing is still a very useful skill for us too. If you heard someone shouting for help, you would know which way to run to get to them. Our ears work best at listening to sounds like music or people talking, but animals have ears suited to different needs.

6) _____
Others have ears that work best for listening to very deep notes. Some animals can hear faint noises, while others are completely deaf. Snakes do not have ears at all and people used to think they were deaf.

7) _____
The bone vibrates when the air or the ground vibrates. Most insects are deaf but grasshoppers can hear through their legs. They call to one another bymaking chirping sounds with their legs. Dogs have superior hearing to us; they can hear notes that are higher than those we hear. If you blow a special dog whistle that makes a very high note, you will not be able to hear it, but any dogs nearby will hear the note and might come running.

8) _____

The missing sentences:

A) But we now know that they can hear sounds through a bone that lies under the skin of the face.

B) This skill is called directional hearing and it was very important to our ancestors in the past.

C) With two ears we can tell which direction a sound is coming from.

D) As we get near old age, we are often unable to hear well.

E) Both our ears work in the same way.

F) You may have noticed the way they twitch their ears to and fro: they do this to find out where a sound is coming from.

G) Wild animals still need this skill today, and many of them have better directional hearing than people.

H) Even very young babies turn to look in the direction a noise is coming from.

I) Some animals can hear notes much higher than any sound your ears can hear.

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