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(playful music)
- [Narrator] Hallux's Hearing Helpdesk.
(phone ringing)
- Aha, I've got a call!
Ahem, Hallux's Hearing Helpdesk!
- [Kid] Hi Professor Hallux.
My friend's ears look very different to mine.
Why's that?
- Well, no two people are exactly the same
and no two ears are identical.
Not even on the same head!
The fleshy part of your ear,
the place where you might have an earring,
is called the lobule or ear lobe.
Some people have large ear lobes and some have small.
Sometimes, the lobes are attached to the head,
other times they are loose.
It doesn't really matter what type you've got,
unless you want to wear a lot of earrings!
The crease around the edge of your ear is called the Helix.
It's often curled in,
although for some people it might be more flat.
Sometimes the outer ear, which is called the pinna,
sticks out, it's unlikely this would affect your hearing
but some people have an operation
to make them sit more closely to the head.
The difference in ear shapes have been used
by fortune tellers who believed that they could give clues
about your health.
The truth is that the kind of ears you end up with
is genetic, passed on in your DNA from your ancestors,
so if your parents and grandparents have big pointy ears,
then chances are you will too.
It might be that an ancestor was an elf!
Some people say that our ears continue to grow
as we get older,
and old people can seem to have bigger ears
than younger ones.
It's probably caused by a combination
of the cartilage becoming less elastic,
and gravity pulling down on our lugholes.
Big or small, pointy or flat,
what they look like doesn't matter
as much as the tremendous job our ears do for us!
- [Narrator] Hallux's Hearing Helpdesk.
with support from Phonak.
Find out more at funkidslive.com/hallux.