A heating aid is not a complete solution to the problem. The sound perceived by the deaf person through a hearing aid is distorted and appears to have more background noise than is heard by someone with normal hearing. Deafened people have to lip-read as well.
Lipreading is difficult, demands intense concentration, and an uninterrupted direct view of the speaker's face. No other activities can take place at the same time: the lipreadar has to stop eating, stop everything in order to concentrate on hearing. It is not a question of stupidity or bad temper—as it sometimes appears to be—but a question of being very easy to misunderstand when tile sound is distorted. Remember what it's like trying to communicate on a very bad telephone line. Frustrating, isn't it? The deaf have to face that all the time.
A useful way of looking at the problem is to see the deaf person as a foreigner—to treat them as if you were in a foreign country. You would speak more clearly, slowly and raise your voice slightly. And you'd use gestures to make your meaning clear, as well as have no hesitation in using pencil and paper to be absolutely certain. You can de all those things with the deaf—as well as making sure you don't obscure your mouth with your hand, a pipe or a cigarette.
Another point quite often overlooked is that a hearing aid may be quite efficient and useful in a quiet, carpeted room—but try it in the street during rush hour, in a noisy ear, in a railway station ticket office, a cinema or a concert hall and you've got a really difficult problem to distinguish speech. So don't suggest to or encourage deaf people to go to functions which are going to make their disability appear worse—and increase their sense of failure.
Careful selection of cinemas with good sound systems is important and you should experiment to find out where the best seats are for hearing. Fitting adaptors for radio and television, observing which 15lends are easier to understand, and making sure that people talking are well-lit are all useful and positive activities.
A person who loses hearing ______.
A. can hear well with the help of a hearing aid
B. can communicate with others by lipreading and at the same time with the help of a hearing aid
C. can only communicate with others with the help of pencil and paper
D. can communicate easily with others by lipreading
A more recent computer innovation, desktop publishing, supplies one good reason for those who write for a living to buy a PC. Desktop publishing is a deceptively simple description for an extremely complex group of hardware and software tools. You can now write text, edit text, draw illustrations, incorporate photographs, design page layouts, and print a finished document with a relatively inexpensive computer and laser printer. Although the new technology offers new freedom, there is a price to be paid for this freedom.
With total control comes total responsibility. In fact, the issue of social responsibility in our new computer age has long been a topic of debate among computer enthusiasts. Some people are concerned with the long-term social effects of the so-called computer revolution. Ironically, many PC pioneers who built and marketed the first machines were 60s-style. advocates of social change. They claim that while personal computer technology has the potential to make society more equal, it's having the opposite effect since upper-middle-class people can afford them and lower-class people cannot.
In addition, the ways that computers are used to monitor the activities of their users have evoked anxiety about the machine. Over 7 million Americans now have their work paced, controlled, and monitored by computers. A computer is more restrictive and powerful in the way it controls people than the old-fashioned assembly line. This can lead to what some have called "tech-stress". Irritated eyes, back problems, and other physical symptoms have also been associated with the extensive use of computers. Although the personal computer may not have had the impact some predicted a decade ago, the combination of computer technology with satellites and cable does promise innovations in the mass media that would have seemed astonishing just a few short years ago.
The dramatic growth of the business dealing in video games is the result of ______.
A. the development of the computer industry
B. the development of wireless technology
C. the decline in the movie industry
D. the depression in the entertainment business
What's the advantage that desktop publishing brings people?
A. It makes home banking a reality.
B. It provides a method for producing professional-looking documents.
C. It makes it possible for people to receive newspapers electronically.
D. It makes it possible for people to bring office work home.
The purpose of this passage is to tell readers ______.
A. how to help the hard of hearing
B. that people who lose their hearing have to learn new ways of communicating
C. that a deaf person has to lip-read even when using a hearing aid
D. that people who lose their hearing have to learn new ways of communicating