BBC: What causes hearing loss?

As we get older, many of us notice our sense of hearing getting worse. Maybe we need to concentrate harder or ask people to speak more loudly. Has that happened to you, Neil?

Not really. A while ago I thought maybe my ears were getting worse, but I had a check-up and everything was fine, thankfully. 

Oh, that's great! In the UK alone, hearing loss affects 18 million people and that number is increasing. In this programme, we'll discover why we lose hearing with age and, as usual, learn some useful new vocabulary. 

And you can also find a transcript of this episode on our website, bbclearningenglish.com. But now listen up, Georgie, becasue I have a question for you! Did you know that the three smallest bones in the human body- the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup- are all located in the ear? But which one of those is the smallest? Is it:

a) the hammer,    b) the anvil   or   c) the stirrup bone?

Hmm. That one's a difficult one. I'm going to say the anvil bone. 

OK, well, we'll find out the answer later on. To understand why our hearing gets worse with age, it's useful to know a little about how the ear works in the first place. Here's Mr Nish Mehta, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Royal! National ENT Hospital  in London, givingn a beginners' class to BBC Radio 4 programme, INside Heath:

Hearing is an amazing sense. It's a special sense, and the ear is really the hearing organ. So, the ear is split up into three main parts: there's the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. The outer ear is the bit that you see-it's on the side of your head. We call that the pinna. Think of that as the satellite dish. It collects the sounds and it funnels them in towards the sense organ. That then gets transmitted to the middle ear. The middle ear's main job is to amplify those sounds. That's done by having an eardrum, which catches it and then vibrates sympathetically to the vibration of the noise that you heard. And then that's passed on to the three smallest bones in the body: the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. 

The ear is made up of outer, middle and inner parts. It's one of our sense organs: specific parts of the body- your ears, eyes, tongue, nose and skin- which allow you to experience the outside world. 

The visible part- the outer ear or pinna- acts like a satellite dish, collecting sounds which it funnels into the middle ear. The verb funnel means to move or direct something through a narrow space. 

Once in the middle ear, the eardrum amplifies the sounds before transmitting them to tiny hairs in the inner ear, which then sounds electrical signals to the brain. It's an incredible system, but unfortunately one that can go wrong at any stage. Here, James Gallagher, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Inside Health, asks Nish Mehta when problems tend to start. We're going to spend a lot of today, Nish, thinking about age-related hearing loss. When does that start?

Wear and tear of your hearing starts from around the age of eight, OK?

OK, so, we're doomed already!