Talking About Cars: Introduction and Vocabulary
| This entry is the first in the Talking About Cars series. The other posts in this series are:
You might also be interested in the Automotive English lesson. This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry is spoken, so that you can listen to it while you read. (MP3) |
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Your Task:
Take a piece of paper and two minutes to answer one of the following three questions:
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Describe your car in English. Do you like your car? Why? What don’t you like about your car?
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If you don’t have a car, describe a car you’d like to have. What are the most important things to you in a car? What don’t you want to have?
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If you don’t have a car, and you don’t want a car. . . tell us why you don’t want a car. What transportation do you think is better? Why? How do you travel most of the time?
Is It Easy?
How well were you able to answer the questions above? Could you say in English everything you would have said in your native language? What was missing?
This week we’re going to help you work on your car vocabulary. And there is a lot of car vocabulary. But, you know how to learn vocabulary: use it! Look at this week as an opportunity to start describing your car. Whether you do it on paper, in your computer, or here at Bite Sized English, it doesn’t matter. The trick is to use the vocabulary as you’re learning it.
This week we’ll follow a slightly different format: we’re going to be learning more vocabulary than usual. So, today we’ll learn some new words—very general vocabulary—and then tomorrow we’ll learn vocabulary for some of the parts of a car. And then we’ll move into car problems on Wednesday and I’ll tell you about my first car on Thursday.
Today, though, it’s just some general words you might need when talking about cars. How many of these words can you use to talk about your car? How important are these things to you? Are there any words that you think should be in the list?
Vocabulary
Reliable: I like old cars. Especially old American cars from the sixties and seventies. But, there’s a problem with cars that old: you can’t be 100% sure that the car will work when you want it to. The car’s aren’t reliable. A reliable car is a car that starts every time you try to start it. . . and doesn’t stop until you turn it off or it runs out of gas. I think that, more than anything else, my car should be reliable.
Fuel-Efficient: Gas—or ‘gasoline’—is getting more expensive everywhere. If you don’t want to pay a lot of money for gas, or ‘fuel,’ there are only two things you can do: drive less, or get a car that can drive very far with very little fuel. (‘Fuel’ is what your car uses for energy.) A car that doesn’t need a lot of gas to go far is ‘fuel efficient.’ Or, the car has good fuel efficiency. American cars are famous for not being fuel efficient.
Family Car: Most men would like to drive a Porsche or Lamborghini. But, if you have to bring your wife, four kids and the family dog with you, a Porsche isn’t the right car to drive. Instead, you might want something more practical. What you need is a family car. A family car can be a minivan or a station wagon. . . normally the important things are that a family car is safe, has a lot of seats for the kids, and room for all the stuff that a family has to carry around.
Photo Credit:
The photo above was taken from Flickr. It was taken by Gem66 and made available under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Gem66, for making this available!
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March 17th, 2009 at 22:13
Hey… I’ll talk about my car.
First I have a very fuel-efficient car, because it has 1300cc and four stroke cycled engine. in additional it uses two kind of fuel, gasoline and gas, which is makes it reliable on the road if one of them run out.
On the other hand it’s a bit small that we can’t get in whole family so it isn’t family car.
Here in Turkey it’s difficult for sb to have a car in his/her early worklife. I get it by obtaining bank loan. And I’m still paying it.
However If it brokes down it is tough work to find a good repairman. For example during the last inspection ,which is made by our government, they found back brakes broken down and I went to a repairman to have it repaired, but he didn’t it well. So I suffer punisment because of him. . .
March 17th, 2009 at 22:35
Ali: Thanks for telling us about your car. As I promised, I’ll try to correct and offer improvements on all the comments posted here. Here’s what you wrote, with my suggestions:
I hope you don’t feel discouaged at the number of corrections. They’re all pretty minor, and I’d be glad to answer any questions if you’re not sure why I made some of them.
Thanks again for your answer!
March 18th, 2009 at 02:02
Thanks Toby…
I must be more careful about tiny grametical mistakes.
March 18th, 2009 at 16:15
I think you mean “gramatical” mistakes. And yours were tiny. I point them out, because I think grammar is the main job of an English teacher. . . after all, you can get vocabulary from a dictionary!