Let's Learn English! Topic: Speed! 🏎️🏃⚡
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Well, hello and welcome to this English lesson about speed.

I will primarily be talking about how fast things go, how we measure how fast things go. Uh what happens if you go too fast when you're driving. It will mostly be related to speed and vehicles although I will talk about a few other things related to speed as well. Speed of course is the word we use to talk about how fast a car goes or how fast an airplane goes or how fast you can run.

Um maybe even how fast you can type. So, welcome to this English lesson about speed. I hope you're able to learn some new English words and phrases that you can use in your next English conversation. Miles per hour. So, depending on where you live in the world,

measure how fast you are going by how many miles you would go in one hour. So if you drove 20 miles per hour you would go 20 miles if you drove for an hour. So

some places though we go by kilometers per hour. This is the Canadian spelling of kilometers. It's not a typo. And the short form is at the top. And so this is how many kilometers you would go if you drove at that speed for one hour. So if I drove at 80 kilometers per hour I would go exactly 80 kilometers. At the end of the hour I will have gone 80 kilometers. That's a good verb tense for you by the way. You will have gone 80

Um so again, miles per hour if you're in, I think the UK or the United States and maybe a few other countries and kilometers per hour in most of the other parts of the world. Um I don't wanna get into an argument about the metric system. Um by the way, you will hear people informally sometimes say kilometers an hour. Like I was going 80 kilometers an hour. The correct term is kilometers per hour. Um

but you will sometimes hear it. I say it myself. Like the other day, I was in a 50 kilometer an hour zone and I was going 55 kilometers an hour. So, kilometers per hour is correct. Sometimes we say kilometers an hour. To speed. So, the verb to speed usually 90% of the time means you're driving faster than the speed limit.

So, I don't usually speed when I'm driving. I try to drive the speed limit or just slightly over. Um when you speed, you risk getting a speeding ticket. Um you can use the verb speed for other things like he was speeding down the hallway or the runner was speeding down the track but usually in English if someone says I

The other day, I was speeding to work. It means that they were going faster than they were legally allowed to go. So, to speed. Hopefully, the blurriness helps you understand this is someone who is speeding. Someone who is driving too fast.

few phrases here that we use when we're talking about speed. When you say how fast was he going? You're asking how many kilometers per hour or how many miles per hour the person was going. If I said my brother drove here in less than 10 minutes. Um Jen might say whoa how fast was he going? And then

then I would say well he was probably speeding. He was he he decided to speed in order to get here quickly. So a common question how fast was he going? Joe got a ticket. How fast was he going?

And then the answer to it is he was going 112 kilometers per hour or he was going 67 miles per hour. So, the answer to the question how fast was he going is he was going and then you give the speed. You could also just say he was going really fast. That works as well.

There's another phrase we use and that's the phrase he was flying. So, I could say this. Jen, I went for a walk. A car went by. I'm not sure how fast he was going but he was flying.

you say that someone in a vehicle is flying, it doesn't mean they're flying. It means they are going really really really fast. And then of course we have what's called the speed limit. So the speed limit is the speed you're allowed to go in a certain area. So if you're driving somewhere, there will be signs and the signs will tell you how fast you're allowed to go. Now in Canada, the

can always go in my opinion you can go a few kilometers over. I think if you drive 115 kilometers per hour in 110 kilometer an hour zone you'll probably be okay. You probably won't get a speeding ticket. But if you do 125 or 130 you probably will. And

And just note there that once you're talking about speed, you don't need to say miles per hour or kilometers per hour every time. So, if I say, the other day, I was driving and I was doing about 100 kilometers an hour. So, I slowed down and just did 50 when I got to town. People understand that I'm talking about my speed. In fact, if I was to say, Brent was driving and he was going 60 kilometers

It's understood that I'm talking about miles per hour because Brent's American. If you said Bob was going 60, it's understood that I was going kilometers per hour because I'm Canadian. Hopefully, I'm not confusing you there.

And then of course in your car you have a speedometer. This is a word I have heard mispronounced by English learners before. It's speedometer. It's said very quickly. You don't over pronounce the syllables. So the O in the middle does not make an O sound. It's speedometer. It's

So, it makes like an ah sound, right? Speedometer. This speedometer says that this person is doing 72 kilometers per hour. Some speedometers will have kilometers per hour and miles per hour on them. In Canada, our speedometers have both. So, if we go to the United States, we can see how fast we're going but this is a speedometer and this is what tells you how fast you're going.

full speed ahead. So there's something in English called full speed. When I drive my lawnmower if I push the pedal all the way down I think my lawnmower does seven or eight kilometers per hour and that's full speed. Full speed is the fastest speed that anything can go or anyone can go. When I run full speed if I try to do the 100 meter dash I

It takes me a very takes me much longer than it did when I was younger even though I'm running full speed. So, full speed is the fastest speed you can run. In a car, if you went full speed, you would get a ticket cuz you would be doing 160 kilometers an hour or per hour or something like that but I think this comes from the phrase full speed ahead when a boat wants to go the fastest it can go. The captain will say full speed ahead.

we also use this phrase in everyday English. So, someone at a meeting might say, okay, let's get to work everyone full speed ahead. That means to work as fast as you can work. So, that's the phrase full speed ahead. Um high speed. So, you might be familiar with the phrase high speed because your country might have a high speed train or if you're old enough, you'll remember there was internet through the phone line but then you could buy high speed internet. So,

Nowadays, almost all of our interconnect connections are high speed. So, there's no need to use it anymore but a high speed train is really cool. If you're wondering where the idea for this lesson came from, it's because Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau announced that they plan to build a high speed train from Toronto to Quebec City.

So, that will be very very cool if they do manage to build that. Canada does not have a high speed train at all. I know in Japan and France and Spain, I think a lot of countries have high speed trains or high speed rail. We don't. So, I am looking forward to it. If we do end up building it, it will take a while but it will certainly make it cool because then I can just

jump on a train in Toronto and I'll be in Quebec City in like three hours or something. It would be amazing. So, high speed refers to something that um that goes really really fast. To accelerate. So, I'm not sure if you have uh seen any kind of car racing in

This is actually called drag racing because they're at a drag strip. So they are going to drive in a straight line. These cars accelerate really, really quickly. When you accelerate, it means you go from

dead stop to going really fast or you might already be moving and you go faster. So when you accelerate you go quicker. That's why in a car there's a pedal. We call it the gas pedal or the accelerator. Cuz when you push that pedal it makes the car go faster. So when you accelerate it means that you accelerate

Either you're not moving and you start moving or you're moving and you start to go faster to accelerate. If you haven't seen any kind of car race, you wanna see speed. That's that's where you see speed. It's kind of amazing how fast the cars will go. They accelerate very very quickly. To pick up speed. You might have noticed that when you drive a car and when you go downhill, you might pick up speed.

that means that the car starts to go faster. Um I noticed when I was driving to Maine to visit Brent, I had to drive up and down some small mountains in New York State uh and whenever I was going down, the car would pick up speed and

So, I wasn't trying to go faster. I wasn't pushing the accelerator. I wasn't trying to accelerate but because I was going downhill, my car would pick up speed. So, it's kind of fun actually. It was like a roller coaster. It would, let me see what my next one is. No, it's not the right one. I would certainly pick up speed on the way down and then I would have to push the accelerator harder to maintain my speed when I went back up.

speed up. If you decide to pass someone, if you're behind a car and you want to pass them, you need to speed up. You need to accelerate. Uh you need to go faster. So, if you are driving the same speed, you just stay behind that person but if you speed up, if you increase your speed, you can pass them. So, sometimes when I'm driving, the speed limit will be 80 kilometers per hour and

and the person in front of me is only doing 65 kilometers per hour. When that happens, I usually speed up and then I usually pass the person. So, I make my car go faster and I pass them. I speed up.

slow down. So, obviously, when you are going a certain speed, you might not want to go that speed forever. So, eventually, you will hit the brakes because you want to slow down. Um sometimes when you look ahead, you'll see that traffic is stopped.

you'll see lots of brake lights ahead of you and then you'll hit the brakes to slow down. You want to slow down so you don't hit somebody. That's the main reason but certainly when you hit the brakes you will slow down. So when you hit the gas you will speed up. When you hit the accelerator when you push the gas pedal there's a lot of phrases in there you will speed up. When you hit the brakes or when you press the brake pedal or hit the brake pedal you will slow down and then of course you

hopefully your brake lights come on so the people behind you know that you are slowing down. So, this is a speed bump. I hate these. I'll just be, I'll just be clear from the start. Speed bumps are bumps in the road designed to make people slow down. So, if you don't know a speed bump is there and you drive over it, you go for a

It's a bump. You might come out of your seat a little bit but there are a few places in my local town where they have installed speed bumps. They do look like this. They put yellow or orange paint on them. Um reflective yellow paint so that you can see them. Uh and they're usually in areas where there are schools. Often, close to schools, they will put speed bumps.

slow people down so that they don't drive too fast in that area because when there's a speed bump you can't drive fast you will damage your car you will hit your head on the ceiling inside the car it's not a good thing and I did want to also talk about I'll talk about this in a bit but I think I forgot one word in this lesson but I can add that later when I talk about something else.

fast as lightning. So we have a few phrases we use to describe people or things or animals or cars or planes or trains. Things that are going really really fast. And we say that they're as fast as lightning. So you might go see a horse race. And you might say to your friend the horse that won was as fast as lightning. And

So they weren't actually as fast like lightning goes from the cloud to the earth in a split second but it's one of the fastest things we see as human beings. So you might describe other things the same way. That teenager drove by the school and

fast as lightning. They were doing 150 kilometers per hour. That actually happened once many many years ago. But when you see someone go really really fast you could say they're as fast as lightning. You could say Usain Bolt is as fast as lightning. He is such a fast sprinter. You could say I'm trying to think of a of a car that

driver's name Mario Andretti. Is that an old name? Yeah he was as fast as lightning in his day. I don't know a lot about car racing. So I that's probably a bad example. I am not as fast as lightning. When I was younger I was on the track and field team and I did run the 100 meter dash.

And I think my fastest time is around 12 seconds. Um so I was okay but uh now I'm not. I'm not as fast as lightning anymore. I'm not sure anyone would have described me that way back then but uh I'm certainly not that fast now. At a snail's pace. So, a snail is a small slimy animal with a shell on its back and

it moves very very slowly. I should have put a picture here of an actual snail. I think you can picture it though. It's like a slug but with a shell. I don't know if you know what a slug is. But snails are slow. So we describe many things in life using the same word like traffic moved at a snail's pace.

I waited in line and the line was moving at a snail's pace or I think traffic is the best example or waiting in a line. Whenever something does not move quickly. We use this phrase. We say that it's moving at a snail's pace. Um this is my least favorite thing in the world when I'm driving.

maybe speed bumps are are in the same category. I do not like traffic jams. I do not like moving at a snail's pace. It is yes, very very challenging for me as a human being to remain patient when I have to drive at a snail's pace. Not very fun.

And this is a radar gun. So, um when you speed, remember when we use the verb speed, it means to drive over the speed limit. When you speed, you risk getting a speeding ticket and I forgot to make a slide for speeding ticket. A speeding ticket is what a police officer will give you if they catch you speeding. They will catch you speeding using a radar gun. So, if you're driving along,

all of the sudden you see a police officer waving you to pull over and

It means that they probably caught you speeding with their radar gun and you're going to get a ticket. I got a ticket a year and a bit ago. Don't know if you remember that. I left my house. I made one left turn. I accelerated to 70 something kilometers per hour in a 60 kilometer per hour zone and all of the sudden, I noticed up ahead, three police cars on the side of the road and a police officer standing with his radar gun

then I drove by doing the speed limit at that point and one of the police cars pulled out and pulled me over and I got a speeding ticket. So I forgot a slide for speeding ticket. It's a piece of paper. It's a fine. So they're basically saying you have to pay this much money. I think it was $80. I

it says, you know, you were doing 76 kilometers an hour in a 60 kilometer per hour zone. Notice I said kilometers an hour and kilometers per hour. It is very common for me to say that. Um and then I had to pay the ticket within 15 days. So, police will sometimes use a radar gun in order to yeah, catch people who are speeding. So, I

We also have speed cameras. So, you can get a ticket from a police officer. They will have a radar gun. They might pull you over and give you a speeding ticket but you can also now in some parts of Canada get a ticket from a speed camera. A speed camera looks exactly like this. There's one right in front of my school and basically if you're speeding it can sense your speed. It can measure your speed. Take a picture.

This is my take a picture hand gesture and then a week or two later you will get a ticket a speeding ticket in the mail and it will have your picture of your car with your license plate and it will tell you how much money you owe. People in my part of Canada do not like speed cameras. In fact the speed camera closest to me has been chopped down five times at night someone has cut the camera.

toppled it over. Like they've they've come with a saw and they've cut it off. So I would say that um they are not very popular speed cameras. This is a speed trap. A speed trap is when police officers try to give out speeding tickets in one place for a few hours. So here you can see these police officers are hiding behind a tree. This is a

they do sometimes when they set up a speed trap. So I got a ticket because there was a speed trap set up. There were three different police officers and they were all in one place checking how fast people were going and giving out tickets and I think they were there for three or four hours. So this is a speed trap. When you see a police car hiding behind a bush. When you see police officers kind of standing behind a bush it is a speed trap.

Um you know what a trap is, right? Like you can trap things like a mouse trap but this is a police speed trap. I don't mind speed traps cuz I I don't like it when people speed but I don't I don't like getting a ticket. Uh so we have the speed of sound and the speed of light. So the speed of sound, I'm not sure exactly what the speed is but it's the speed that your voice would travel to someone in the distance. It's

you go somewhere where there's an echo, you can kinda get a sense of the speed of sound because your voice travels and then bounces off something and comes back to you. Um when someone is really far away and they yell, it actually, the time that they yell and the time you hear them is slightly different because the sound has to travel and it travels from

I'm going to say shot in the dark somewhere around 600 miles an hour. I don't actually know. And then we have the speed of light. So, sound travels at a certain speed and light travels at a certain speed. I think it takes eight minutes for the light from the sun to get to earth. The speed of light is obviously way faster than the speed of sound. Humans can observe the speed of sound way

you do certain things but you can't really observe the speed of light. Like you can't like turn a flashlight on and off and then someone in the distance would be like, oh, it's a split second before I see it. It light is way faster than that. It's almost, I think the best word, humans perceive the speed of light as almost instantaneous. Like, when you turn a light on four kilometers away, I see it

almost the same time you turn it on. There's no way to be able to tell. Uh and then in the chat I see Hafia saying lightning and thunder are a perfect example. Yes. You see lightning and then you wait a little bit and then you hear thunder. That is a great example actually. So again when there's a storm and

you see lightning because the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound and then one or two seconds later, you hear the thunder that the lightning produces and then there's a movie called Speed. I don't know. I just felt silly last night when I was finishing this up. So, I put this slide on. This is a movie with Keanu Reeves and I can't remember the other actress but it's about a bus and if they go too slow, I think the bus is

Yeah, I think the bus blows up. I'm not 100% sure. Can't remember the movie but this is my last slide. So, um this was a lesson about speed, the measurement of how fast people and things are going. Not about the movie speed but if you're interested in a movie where you will hear some of the same words and phrases, I'm sure that one would be a good one.

Hi, Bob the Canadian here. Thank you for listening to this English podcast lesson. If you would like to support me in the work that I do as an online English teacher, please visit patreon.com slash bobthecanadian.