1. A method for determining hearing thresholds in the absence of pure-tone testing, comprising: administering an adaptive speech recognition test to an individual, which comprises administering to the individual a plurality of items from a calibrated item pool comprising items scaled along a continuum of speech recognition ability, each administered item comprising two trials and each trial comprising a paired comparison of utterances, wherein the utterances can be the same or different from one another and the difference comprises acoustic and phonetic features occurring within minimal pairs, obtaining a response from the individual based on the individual's speech recognition ability to distinguish the acoustic and phonetic features by a comparison of a first utterance of the paired utterances with a second utterance of the paired utterances wherein at least one of the first and second utterances is a spoken utterance for the individual to hear, wherein a relative difficulty of a subsequent item is determined by the correctness of the response to a previous item, assigning a scoring value to the response from the individual for each administered item, obtaining a test score from a plurality of response scoring values, and converting the test score to a scaled score representing speech recognition ability expressed in the same metric as the item difficulty; and calculating a hearing threshold, without the use of pure-tone testing, designated as y j for the individual at least at one of the following frequencies, wherein j =0.5, 1, 2, 4, and 8 kHz using the formula 
 y j =b j0 +b j1 x 1 +b j2 x 2 +b j3 x 3 wherein the value for x 1 expressed on a 0 to 100 scale is the test score of the administered adaptive speech recognition test, the value for x 2 is the chronological age of the individual expressed in years, and the value for x 3 is the self-report of perceived hearing handicap/impairment of 1 for yes and 0 for no, wherein at j=0.5 kHz the b j0 , b j1 , b j2 and b j3 constants are 103.69, −1.23, −0.21, and 7.55, respectively; at j=1 kHz the b bj0 , b bj1 , b bj2 , and b j3 constants are 133.27, −1.59 , −0.30, and 9.40, respectively; at j=2 kHz the b jo , b j1 , b j2 , and b j3 constants are 154.00 , −1.92 , −0.17, and 7.51, respectively; at j=4 kHz the b j0 , b j1 , b j2 , and b j3 constants are 144.57 , −1.84, 0.06, and11.10, respectively; and at j=8 kHz the b j0 , b j1 , b j2 , and b j3 constants are 122.91 , −1.67, 0.38, and 13.57, respectively.