Abstract: Measures used for impulse noise description and evaluation are quite different from those for continuous noise on account of their different characteristics. A review of the damage risk criteria as well as the recation of community to impulse noise is presented in this paper, and the evaluation of the hearing protector under impulsive noise environment is also re-examined. Many questions such as the application of equal-energy rule to impulse noise and the interaction of con-tinous and impulse noise are still in dispute. Further investigations in a more comprehensive way are expected.