Increasingly, researchers are employing fitted exposure-response functions to not only characterize the relationship between sound level and prevalence of annoyance but also to compare the relative noise tolerance of individual communities. The sound level at which 50% of the population is annoyed has been advanced as a community noise tolerance metric. This paper combines prior research and recent simulations to reframe the discussion in terms of plausible distributions of individual (personal) noise tolerances within a given community; the integrals of those (density) distributions become the (cumulative) observed exposure-response relationships. Various tolerance distributions are developed, their resulting cumulative exposure-response relationships calculated, and the ability of commonly-employed functional forms to represent those cumulative relationships presented. The results of the current investigation strongly suggest that data sets which include annoyance fractions of 50% have the greatest chance of accurately predicting the 50%-annoyed sound level. The further the data set lies from the 50%-annoyed point the more dependent an extrapolated estimation becomes on the fitted functional form accurately representing the true cumulative relationship. Errors of estimation are shown for a number of tolerance distributions, functional forms and experimental data ranges. Finally, some remedial recommendations are offered.