前英国国会议员现评论家马修·帕里斯在最近的一篇专栏中提到，随着年龄的增长，他本来就大的耳朵变得更大了，他觉得有些尴尬，正在寻找使耳朵缩小的方法。
mp-turned-pundit matthew parris is
1 about a very big subject – his ears. in his column in the times this week, he said that as he has got older his ears have got larger. "they started quite big and now it's becoming embarrassing," he complained. "are there any pills you can take to shrink them? never mind penis enlargement. i'm looking for ear reduction."
parris may not realise it, but he was writing on the 20th anniversary of one of the first scientific studies of ear size. anecdotally, it had always been felt that old
blokes（家伙，小子） tended to have bigger ears than everyone else. in july 1993, james heathcote, a gp in bromley, and a group of his colleagues set out to test the observation. they measured the ears of a
2 selected group of 206 of their patients over the age of 30, and calculated that ears increased by an average of 0.22mm per year – a centimetre (or just under half an inch) over 50 years.
heathcote's findings were backed up by japanese data published in 1996 and by an italian study in 1999. the latter concluded that men's ears were significantly larger than women's, that ears did tend to get bigger as people got older, and that the growth occurred in both men and women. whatever parris thinks, this is not just an old man issue. it may be that women wear their hair longer, so we are less aware of their ears.
several reasons have been adduced for the growth. ears (and indeed noses)
3 with age, thanks both to a loss of
4（弹性） in the skin and to the effects of gravity. earlobes
6, a phenomenon that can be
7 by heavy
8. more controversially, it has been suggested that because, unlike bone, cartilage continues to grow and ears are made of cartilage, that may also account for the phenomenon. but the evidence is
9, and some researchers argue that
cartilage（软骨） is only being replaced and does not account for the growth in ear size.
the good news for parris is that plastic surgery can halt much of the
10, and "
5 jobs" are increasingly common – a
11 at a couple of grand. at the moment, it is mainly women who are having it done, to reverse the effects of a lifetime of
12 earrings, but men are sure to follow. over to you, matthew. ear today, gone tomorrow.
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