Talking About Cars: Car Problems
| This entry is part of the Talking About Cars series. 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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Cars are freedom. Or, that seems to be the American way of thinking. Our cars are our ‘wings,’ they let us leave home, go where we want. . . and when we want to go. There’s no other form of transportation that’s as flexible as cars. Trains and trams and buses and bikes all have more limitations. As long as the car works the way it’s supposed to.
But what happens when your car doesn’t work? Then the car doesn’t seem so much like ‘freedom’ as it does a pile of metal. And, if your car is as old as my first car was (I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow), you probably have your share of problems with the car. Today, we’re going to talk about some common car problems.
- The first vocabulary associated with car problems is the term ‘break down.’ We use it to describe when a car—or any other complicated machine or system—stops working. It can be a noun or a phrasal verb: “I had a break down on the way to work today.” Or, “my car breaks down all the time!” All the other vocabulary on this page describes specific kinds of break downs.
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The most common break down, I think, is the flat tire. A flat tire happens when your tire has a hole in it and the air that’s supposed to be inside the tire escapes. A lot of things can cause a flat tire, from broken glass to nails.
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Your car needs gas—short for ‘gasoline’—to run. We all know this, but sometimes we don’t drive to the gas station soon enough. When we wait too long to go to the gas station, it’s too late and our car has no more gas to drive on. Then, it stops. We ‘run out of gas.’ I think that every driver runs out of gas once or twice, but it’s embarrassing. . . because it seems so easy to avoid.
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A problem I had with my first car a lot was that the engine would get too hot. Engines always get hot—they run by burning gasoline—but there’s a system to keep the engine from being too hot: a liquid called ‘coolant’ is pumped through the engine and cooled by fresh air in the ‘radiator.’ When you don’t have enough coolant, or there isn’t enough fresh air reaching the radiator, your car can ‘overheat.’ ‘Overheating,’ can be very serious. It doesn’t always cause your car to break down, but it can cause serious long-term damage!
What kind of break downs have you had with your car? Have I forgotten any important break downs? Do any of you have a very reliable car that never breaks down? Would you pay more for a car if you knew it would never break down?
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March 18th, 2009 at 02:54
I think if your car is older than 5 years old you can get a problem at any unexpected times. For example my old car used to brake down by running out of batary. If I stoped the engine by mistake in the traffic jam and If I wasn’t alone I could start is again by pushing. but when I was alone I used to feel I was the silliest man in the world…
March 18th, 2009 at 16:20
In “any unexpected times” you don’t need the s on times, and the word ‘unexpected’ is . . . well, ‘at any time’ sounds fine, and so does ‘at an unexpected time,’ but both together is a bit too much. But that’s more style than grammar: write the way sounds good to you, I’m just telling you what sounds good to me.