KLETC Benchmark 1 Practice Test

In communication, noise means anything that interferes with the content of the message being sent or received. That can be physical distractions like a loud room that makes it hard to hear, semantic issues like unclear language or jargon that muddles meaning, psychological factors like biases that color interpretation, or technical problems in the channel that distort the message. The option that defines noise this way captures all these ways interference can affect what the sender intends to convey and what the listener understands.

The other ideas don’t fit as noise in this sense: ghosting describes someone stopping contact rather than interfering with the message itself; a musical tone used in sirens is a signal, not interference with message content; a sound system malfunction is an equipment failure, not an interference with the actual content being communicated.