Meet The Organoleptics – People Who Sip, Taste And Sniff For A Living - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

Meet the Organoleptics - People who sip, taste and sniff for a living

A Paul Fisher sits at a circular table. Before him are two dozen cups of Java coffee of various hues and tastes. The president of Tristao Trading, coffee importers in New York, is preparing to 'cup'.

He raises a spoon to his lips and tastes. He will rank each sample for body, flavour, grade, colour, degree of moisture and acidity. He gives high marks for the soft fruitiness of one, rejects the oily smell and taste of another. After each sampling, he avails himself of the spit sink attached to the table. He decides whether the Kenyan AA batch ordered by one of America's top coffee companies gets a high enough grade to make it to the market.

Fisher is an organoleptic, a person who uses his senses of smell and taste to make a living. Organoleptics sip soft drinks, taste teas, taste wines and test perfume performance.

B Where do companies find these skilled workers? You might imagine huge recruitment campaigns on university campuses, seeking students with large nostrils and sensitive palates. Not even close. Most firms hire tasters and smellers based simply on the fact that these people like the work; anyone with a normal sense of taste and smell can learn to do the job.

According to John Monsell at the Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, virtually all humans are born with an ability to detect sweet, sour, bitter and salty compounds. However, Monsell finds there is a genetic component to having an excellent sense of taste.

C Most of what we call taste involves smelling from the back of the throat and up into the top of the nose. Smell contributes so much to our appreciation of food that most of us could not recognise our favourite dishes relying on taste alone. For example, if you hold your nose and eat an apple and an onion, they taste the same (although an onion might make your tongue sting).

The average person can detect at least 10,000 odours. Being able to identify those smells is another story. If blindfolded, most people can put a name ('roses', 'fish', 'oak') to fewer than a hundred scents.

D Organoleptics come from all sorts of backgrounds. Peter Goggi, president of Royal Estates, the tea-buying arm of Lipton, began his career as a research chemist.

'I used to bring samples down to the tea-tasters and listen to their comments,' he recalls. 'I started tasting with them, and thought it might be a good job.' To get some training, he moved to England, then to Kenya. 'The best way to learn,' says Goggi, 'is to taste and taste and taste. I would do about a thousand teas a day.'

'We sip the tea and spit it out,' Goggi explains. One good turn around the mouth will tell an expert taster all he or she needs to know. 'The important thing is to evaluate tea in the same way from cup to cup,' he says. 'We brew the tea for six minutes and taste it with a teaspoon of skimmed milk to bring out the colour.'

E Jack Wild's job isn't quite so refreshing. He had a degree in biochemistry when he went to work at Hill Top Research in 1958. The consumer-products market was taking off then, thanks to postwar technology and increased disposable income. People were beginning to worry about odours.

Hill Top Research tests products for eliminating bad odours. People who volunteer to take part in a test are paid not to use soaps or perfumes for ten days. After each participant has been sprayed with deodorant, the researchers start the ranking process. According to Wild, descriptive ability is not important, since being able to say an odour reminds you of one thing or another is not necessary.

F James Bell started as a clerk at Givaudan Roure, leaders in the creation and manufacture of perfume. Put through a smelling test, Bell did well and was sent to a special school in France. 'I had to learn to identify about 2800 synthetic and 140 natural materials,' Bell says.

Today, Bell is vice-president and senior perfumer of Givaudan Roure. He recognises as many as 5000 scents and must be able to devise special orders requested by leading perfume companies. They want something 'beautiful' or 'fresh', and Bell takes it from there.

When the experts at Givaudan Roure were asked to develop a men's fragrance named after Michael Jordan, the famous basketballer, Bell's perfumery team went to work and identified four core themes – Cool (in honour of Jordan's boyhood home in North Carolina), Fairway (for his love of golf), Home Run (a leather note to represent Jordan's interest in baseball) and Rare Air (celebrating his basketball achievements). The resulting fragrance has become a top-selling men's brand.

G Bell is one of the few in his field who believe natural ability is a pre-requisite for maximising one's sensibilities. 'You start with a superior sense of smell, but then you must train it, like a concert pianist.'

'Perfume,' he continues, 'is like writing music. It has a base note, a midnote and a top note. You smell the top note initially, the midnotes enhance the top note, and the base note brings it all together.'

We owe a real debt to all those organoleptics out there. They make our world smell a little better and taste a little fresher. And just what do they ask of you? Not much. Just that once in a while, we take the time to stop and smell the rose-scented room freshener.