A patient with a diagnosis of left-sided Bell's palsy would have difficulty with which of the following?

The correct choice indicates that a patient with left-sided Bell's palsy would experience difficulty with smiling. Bell's palsy results from inflammation or dysfunction of the facial nerve (cranial nerve VII), which controls muscles of facial expression on the affected side. In this case, since the left side is impacted, the patient would have weakness or paralysis in the muscles responsible for facial movements on the left, making it challenging to perform actions like smiling, raising the eyebrow, or closing the eye on that side.

In contrast, while chewing food might be affected by other factors like muscle strength in the jaw, it primarily involves the trigeminal nerve (cranial nerve V), which is not directly involved in Bell's palsy. Scanning to the left does not pertain specifically to facial muscle control and is more related to eye movements, which are controlled by cranial nerves that are not impacted by Bell's palsy. Hearing may be affected slightly due to the proximity of the facial nerve to the structures responsible for hearing, but it is not a direct symptom of Bell's palsy itself. Thus, the most prominent difficulty related to facial nerve involvement in left-sided Bell's palsy is smiling.