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Transcript is below the questions and answers 記録は質問と答えの下にあります。

Questions

 

1. Which of these are a feature of true electric cars?

A: They use an internal combustion engine for long distances.

B: They only have a battery powered engine.

C: They only use the electric engine for slow running.

D: They have more than one type of engine.

2. Why doesn’t an electric car have a drivetrain?

A: An electric car doesn’t have an engine.

B: It is something to rest your feet on.

C: They need to transfer power from the engine to the wheels at the back.

D: They don’t have a single motor at the front.

 

3. Which of these is a reason why an electric car would be safer than a gasoline car?

A: They can’t drive as fast.

B: They are full of gasoline, which is flammable.

C: Fewer people drive them.

D: They have a much lower center of gravity.

 

4. Why do electric cars only need one pedal?

A: They can keep accelerating forever.

B: They don’t need to stop.

C: One pedal can be both accelerator and bake.

D: They brake automatically.

 

5. Why can electric cars accelerate smoothly?

A: They don’t use brakes.

B: They don’t need gears.

C: They don’t move forward.

D: They are powered by electricity.

 

6. Why does having fewer moving parts make an electric car cheaper than a gasoline car?

A: You need more power to make parts move.

B: Parts that move are more liable to break.

C: There is no way to replace moving parts.

D: You have to have many parts.

 

7. Which of these is closest in meaning to “range anxiety”?

A: Driving anger

B: Long fear

C: Shooting feelings

D: Distance worries

 

8. What was Adam Gordon’s profession?

A: Monk

B: Scientist

C: Politician

D: Researcher

 

9. What did Alessandro Volta invent?

A: The first battery.

B: The first electric car.

C: The first motor.

D: The first engine.

 

10. Which of these things were not used in the first Faraday Motor?

A: Mercury

B: String

C: Wire

D: Magnets

 

11. Why would an electric train be good for a mine?

A: They are cheap to run.

B: They don’t consume oxygen.

C: They don’t require many workers.

D: They can run automatically.

 

12. What did Gaston Plant invent that had a big impact?

A: the engine starter

B: the car radio

C: the rechargeable battery

D: the bicycle

 

13. Why were electric taxis nicknamed “hummingbirds”?

A: Because of the name of the company.

B: Because of the colors they were painted.

C: Because they were bird shaped.

D: Because of the sound of their engines.

 

14. Why were early cars the shape that they were?

A: Because they needed to go very fast.

B: Because they were modelled on early carts.

C: Because it was the easiest shape to make.

D: Because their inventor liked the shape.

 

15. Which of these is not a reason why electric cars outsold gasoline cars in 1915?

A: Gasoline cars were noisy.

B: Electric cars could go really far.

C: Gasoline cars were expensive.

D: Electric cars started straight away.

 

16. Why did gasoline cars become cheaper after the First World War?

A: Road networks started to expand.

B: They were equipped with automatic starters.

C: They were all converted to electricity.

D: Oil was discovered in the Middle East.

 

17. How many cars will be electric by 2040?

A: 6%

B: 16%

C: 60%

D: 66%

 

18. How could China make electric cars more environmentally friendly?

A: By applying stricter environmental laws to rare metal mining.

B: By having fewer coal-fired electricity plants.

C: By investing in different kinds of batteries.

D: By calculating the amount of emissions that come from gasoline cars.

 

19. Do you think electric cars will surpass gasoline cars?
20. Steven mentions driverless cars. Do you think driverless cars will become mainstream?
21. What other things can we do to help the environment?

 

Answers

 

1. B 2. D 3. D  4. C  5. B  6. B  7. D  8. A  9. A  10. B  11. B  12. C  13. D  14. B  15. B  16. D  17. C  18. A

 

19. Do you think electric cars will surpass gasoline cars?

 

              I am certain that they will. I don’t know how long it will take, but a time will come when the only gasoline powered cars are in museums.  I believe that the main reasons for this will be environmental, economic, and technological.

              The first and most obvious reason will be the impact that gasoline powered cars have on the environment. As Steven mentioned in his talk, no matter how you look at it, electric cars are better for the environment. They release more emissions than any other type of land based transport and gasoline is obviously a finite resource. The drilling of oil is, in itself, harmful to the environment. Electric cars are hindered by the source of their electricity but, as more economical batteries and more environmentally friendly sources of power become available, this will disappear.

              The second reason is economic. Electric cars are currently cheaper than gasoline cars and this difference will only increase from here on. As more electric cars are produced, the manufacturing costs will come down. They will also be far more reliable and require less servicing. And, of course, electricity is cheaper than gasoline.

              Finally, we have the technological differences. As more research and development is put into electric cars, they will naturally become more technological advanced than simple gasoline cars. There will be a point where gasoline cars are to the electric car as the floppy disk is to the online cloud storage.

              For these reasons, there will come a day where there are no longer any gasoline cars on the road.

 

20. Steven mentions driverless cars. Do you think driverless cars will become mainstream?

 

              Yes, I do. It is an inevitable progression. So many mainstream companies have become involved in their development that there is more benefit to making it happen than to stopping. The main reasons are financial. Driverless cars will cut down labor costs, reduce accidents, make cars more efficient, and make the transport of goods easier.

              The most obvious financial benefit, at least in the short term, is that driverless cars will cut the number of human drivers that are needed. This will save companies that rely on drivers a lot of money. However, in the long term, the impacts on society are yet to be seen.

               Secondly, AI operated cars will be far safer than human operated cars and the financial cost of accidents will be reduced. In an accident, we have to cover the cost to property, the medical costs, and the lost working hours. All of these make accidents a huge financial drain on any economy. AI cars will reduce that drain to almost zero.

              Cars will become more efficient because AI systems will go at the optimum speed for any terrain and will lose less momentum when braking. With an AI system, all cars will be connected and there will be no need for sudden and reactive braking.

              And finally, cars that can drive faster, more efficiently, and with fewer accidents, will obviously be able to deliver goods faster and more reliably.

              All in all, the benefits of driverless cars are too many for it not to happen.

 

 

21. What other things can we do to help the environment?

 

              There are so many things that we could do, both as individuals and as a society. I going to assume that the question is asking about me personally and I am going to explain two changes that I could make to my life to positively affect the environment. I think that if I ate less beef and bought more sustainable products, my existence on this planet would have a less harmful effect on the environment.

              Beef, if locally sourced, has a very small impact on the environment. The problem comes when the meat is mass marketed beef. In order to produce cheap beef, companies clear large areas of forest to make cheap grazing land. This reduces the number of trees, which absorb CO2, and increase the number of cows, which produce methane. The companies then have to redirect huge amounts of water and deliver vast amounts of food to raise these cattle. This produces CO2 and redirecting water can destroy habitats. Then, when the cows are fully grown, they, or the meat, have to be shipped to the market, resulting in tons of CO2. If I, and other like-minded people, cut down on the amount of beef we eat, it is possible that the number of cows would be reduced and the harm we are causing the environment could be undone.

              The second thing I could do is to buy more sustainable products. I tend to buy a lot of cheaply made products from places such as the dollar store. These products do not cost much and I know that I will not use them for long. They are cheap so when they break, or run out, I will just throw them away, safe in the knowledge that I will be able to buy another one cheapy. While that is good for my wallet, it is not good for the environment. To make a cheap product, the manufacturers have to cut costs. Quite often these can be in the form of environmental protocols. The products then have to be shipped to where am I and cheap products have to be shipped in bulk, which creates a lot of CO2. And, finally, when the product is thrown away, it is buried in a landfill and harms the land as it breaks down. Locally made, sustainable products might be more expensive to buy, but they are much better for the planet in the long run.

 

 

Transcript

Hi, good afternoon, or good morning, or good evening, or whatever time it is where you are. Today, I’m going to talk to you about electric cars. We’re going to talk about a few things today. First, we’re going to look at what is an electric car. Then we’re going to look at some advantages, some disadvantages, a little bit of the history, and we’re going to look at the future of electric cars. And then we’re going to have a very short talk about the environment as well. I’ll try not to make this too long.

 

OK, firstly, so what is an electric car? Well, obviously, it’s a car that runs on electricity. Now, some people get a little bit confused here because there are two types of electric cars. Well, there are hybrid cars and there are true electric cars. Now, hybrid cars are a mix of an electric engine and a gasoline engine, an internal combustion engine. Hybrid cars use the electric engine for slow running, city running or when they’re slowing down or moving away from traffic lights and things like that. And they use their internal combustion engine, the gasoline engine, for longer distances and general driving. Electric cars don’t have a gasoline engine. They only have a battery powered electric engine. And we’re going to be looking at that kind of car today. Ok?

 

So. what are some of the advantages of an electric car? There are quite a few. Let’s have a look at them. Firstly, space. I don’t know if you’ve sat in a car. I expect most of you have. But if you’ve sat in a regular car with an internal combustion engine, you’ll know that there isn’t a lot of space. The front of the car is obviously full of the engine. Inside the bonnet or the hood you have the engine. You have space in the trunk, in the boot, at the back to put your stuff. But inside the car itself, you don’t have a lot of leg room. And running along the middle of the car, of course, is a raised lump. I’m sure we all remember being children and not wanting to sit in the middle seat in the back. That’s because you have to have your knees up by your chest. That raised lump down the middle is the drive train. That is what transfers power from the engine at the front of the car to the wheels at the back of the car. Electric cars don’t have that. Electric cars have a motor on all of the four wheels. They don’t have a single motor at the front. Because of that, they don’t have to have the drivetrain in the middle. They also have, because of the big flat battery, they are much lower to the ground. So there is a lot more leg room in electric cars. Also, there is a lot more storage space because if you think about it, no engine, that means there is nothing to go in the front of the car. So in the electric car, you have space at the back in the boot and you have space at the front in the bonnet. A lot more space.

 

They are also much quieter. Most of the noise from a car comes from the internal combustion engine, of course. The muffler silences that a little bit, but they’re still fairly loud. Electric cars don’t have that noise. They have a hum, I suppose. There was talk of putting sound into electric cars because some people say they can be quite dangerous because we’ve grown used to listening for the sound of a car before we cross the road. And if you don’t hear the car, you might step out in front of it. I mean, we should still look, of course, even if we can’t see anything, we should still look. But there is sense to that.

 

Electric cars are also safer. Now, what do I mean by that? There are two things. Firstly, because the bottom of an electric car is generally just the battery. They have a much lower center of gravity. An internal combustion engine has a higher body, and the engine is higher towards the middle of the car. That means they flip over much more easily in an accident, whereas an electric car being lower to the ground, having a lower center of gravity is more stable and is less likely to flip over in an accident.

 

Also, electric cars are less likely to combust, to catch on fire. Gasoline powered cars, of course, gasoline is flammable, there is a chance that they could catch fire. Electric cars… Yeah, we know some electric batteries do catch fire. We’ve all seen videos of mobile phones burning holes through people’s pockets, but that is rare. Electric cars catch fire much less frequently than gasoline cars. So, they’re safer.

 

They only need one pedal. They actually have two, but they only need one. In most cars, most automatic cars, you have two pedals, you have the accelerator, and you have the brake. The accelerator makes you go faster. The brake stops you, of course. Electric cars don’t need that. One pedal can make you go faster and slower. If you push down on the accelerator, the electric current to the motors on each wheel is increased, making them spin faster. When you take your foot off the pedal, the electric current is reduced, making the wheels spin slower. And also, they use something called regenerative braking. That means when you take your foot off the accelerator and the car starts to slow down, the spinning wheels, they turn a turbine, which turns the generator and they actually slightly recharge the batteries. So that, of course, adds friction, too, which means you slow down much quicker. So, they only need one pedal. Now, because they only have the one pedal, because they have this system of accelerating and braking, they don’t need gears. Gasoline cars have to have gears. You know, when you’re driving and your car goes eeeeeeeeeeeeeee, that’s the car going up, shifting up or down through the gears. Electric cars don’t do that because they just increase the amount of electricity, increasing the revolutions of the wheel. That makes them much smoother. It also makes them much faster because they don’t have to lose speed shifting through gears. So, if you push down on the pedal, you can accelerate much more smoothly and much faster.

 

They are also better for the environment. Of course, a large amount of the greenhouse gases we are releasing into the world come from gasoline cars, come from internal combustion engines. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. Now, a lot of people will say that the electricity produced for the electric cars is also bad for the environment. And maybe it is. We’ll talk about that at the end.

 

Electric cars are cheaper than gasoline cars. You might not believe that because you’ve seen the price of electric cars themselves, but once you’ve paid for the car, running costs are an awful lot cheaper. Electricity is far cheaper than gasoline. Also, electric cars have fewer moving parts. An internal combustion engine has a lot of moving parts. And when parts move, they rub against other parts. They wear, they tear, they break. You have to replace them. Electric cars have fewer moving parts, which means there’s less maintenance required for them. And what with electricity being cheaper. Generally, electric cars are cheaper than petrol cars over their life.

 

OK, so let’s have a look at a few disadvantages. Electric cars are not perfect. Of course, there are disadvantages. Show me a technology that has no disadvantages. I’ll be interested to see it. OK, firstly, well, right now, the biggest problem, I suppose, is distance: charging stations. People who buy electric cars, they get something called “range anxiety”. That means you’re nervous about how far you can go. Obviously, with a gasoline car or an internal combustion engine, you can drive, I don’t know, 3, 400 miles, 5, 600 kilometers on a tank. And then when you run out of gasoline, you can be pretty sure you’re going to be able to find a gasoline station to refill your car. That doesn’t apply to electric cars. If you’re going to drive a long way and the range is about the same as a gasoline car, you cannot guarantee that you’ll find a charging station. And if you do, it will take a long time to charge your car. Right now, Google’s Google maps is using an AI system that will plan a route for you and show you where the charging stations are. But that is a problem right now. As electric cars take off, as they become more mainstream, the number of charging stations will increase, of course, and that problem will probably disappear. Also, the amount of time it takes to charge the car will also decrease. Right now, there’s an Israeli company that has developed a battery that can fully charge within five minutes. Once that technology becomes mainstream as well. Gasoline cars will not have an advantage over electric cars when it comes to range.

 

Cold weather. If you have a mobile phone and you live in a place that has a lot of snow or very cold winters like I do, you’ll find that your phone loses charge very quickly. You’ll go out in the morning at 50 percent and it will stop working. That, of course, is the same with electric cars. The lithium batteries that they use, they don’t work as well in cold weather. I don’t really understand the science, but I think the molecules move less quickly and don’t hold as much of a charge. But anyway, if you’re driving in cold conditions, you can lose 20, 30, even 40 percent of your range. If the weather’s cold. You can avoid that by heating up the car before you go. But not everybody wants to do that. And that is a disadvantage over gasoline cars. At some point, I’m sure that will be fixed, but right now that is a problem.

 

The cost of the car itself. I just said over the life of the car, it is cheaper to buy an electric car than a gasoline car. But initially, the initial purchase price of an electric car is very high.

 

Source of electricity. If you are getting your electricity from the national grid and it comes from coal fired power stations or gasoline burning power stations or gas burning power stations, your electricity is going to be harming the environment. However, there are other sources of electricity and we’ll look at that later, too.

 

OK, let’s have a little look at the history of the electric car. Now we have to look at the history of … not the history of electricity … We have to look at the history of the discovery of electricity, I suppose. I’m not going to go into that in a lot of detail, partly because there’s a lot I don’t really understand. But basically, Adam Gordon, a Scottish monk who was also a scientist, he did a lot of research into the conductiveness of magnetic fields and how they can produce electricity. And then in the 1740s, Benjamin Franklin, who I’m sure you’ve heard of, he added to Adam Gordon’s work and he did a lot more research into electricity and conductivity and magnetic fields.

 

And then if we move on into the next century, Alessandro Volta, whose name you might have heard of, he invented the first real battery. It’s quite big. It’s about this tall and it’s not very practical, but it did hold an electric charge. He was the first person to be able to store electricity like that. And then Michael Faraday, who came a little bit later. He was also extremely good looking, it seems. He created a Faraday motor, I think it’s called. What he did is he had a magnet and a piece of wire hanging down and he filled the bowl with mercury, I think, which now we know is quite harmful. But he filled the bowl with mercury and the metal wire spins around the magnet as it travels around the magnetic field, which is kind of the first real electric engine, I suppose.

 

Then we have Anyos Jedlik, who I think came from Hungary, who invented the first real electric motor. He had a cable and he passed …sorry … a wire and he passed electricity through it. And as the magnetic field in the wire changed the magnet underneath rotated. So, he created the first real electric engine, I suppose. Then 1837, Robert Davidson, he took that engine and he put it in a train. Nobody really took his idea. And in fact, his train was destroyed by railway workers because they thought it would destroy their jobs. Because up until then, of course, trains were steam-powered and people would shovel coal into the engines. And a lot of people had to work on a train and they figured it would lose, it would take their jobs. In the end, electric trains were actually used in mines because steam trains … I mean, when you burn coal to make steam, you have to use oxygen. And when you’re down in a mine, oxygen is a rarity. Oxygen is scarce. You don’t want to waste oxygen. You want it for the people working down there. Electric trains don’t use the oxygen. So, they were much more practical in mines. So, he took the engine and put it in a train.

 

And then 1880, Gaston Plant, I don’t know how to pronounce his name, he invented the first rechargeable battery. And this is where things start to take off. 1881, Gustave Trouve, he put that rechargeable battery inside a bicycle and he made an electric bicycle. Again, nobody really followed him. Nobody really liked … nobody really listened to his idea. However, this is quite interesting. When people wouldn’t buy his bicycles, he took the rechargeable battery and the engine off the bicycle and he put it on a boat, thereby inventing the outboard motor, which a lot of people use today. So that was quite interesting. Then about 20, about ten years later, Thomas Parker in the UK, he put the same engine into a cart and he invented the first real electric car. Then it took off really quickly, became very popular. 1890s, 1900s, we get a lot of buses, taxis and small vehicles appearing. The small vehicles are actually … sorry … the taxis were actually, nicknamed hummingbirds because of their sound, the hum of the electricity as they drive around. And then we get more and more cars. 1912 was almost the peak. 1912 electric cars really start to take off. Have you ever thought about the shape of the first cars back then in the early 20th century? They’re all very this kind of curvy shape. Have you ever stopped to think why? Well, basically, it’s because they modelled it on the horse and cart the horse and carriage, which was the only real method of transport they knew at that point.

 

So, a lot of the cars, keep the same shape as the horse and carriage. People, because cars didn’t go very fast, people weren’t concerned about air resistance and things like that. So, cars didn’t have to be sleek like they are today. So that’s why the cars were that shape. Anyway, not all cars were slow, of course. This car was the first car in the world to break the 100 kilometers an hour milestone. Drove very, very fast. Also an electric car. OK, 1915, most cars on the road were electric. And then next came steam. There were actually a lot of steam powered cars, which I didn’t know. And then gasoline cars. Only 20 percent of the cars on the road were gasoline. There are several reasons for that. Firstly, gasoline cars wouldn’t start automatically. You had to turn a crank to turn over the engine to get the car to start. Sometimes that would be easy. Sometimes it would take a long time. That was a lot of work. You also had gears. Gasoline cars obviously have a lot of gears. Gasoline cars are noisy, they’re smelly and they vibrate, or they did back then. Gasoline cars were expensive. They were far more expensive than electric cars and gasoline cars could only run short distances. Gasoline was extremely expensive and there wasn’t a lot of it.

 

However, in about 1920, about five years after the First World War finishes, road networks start to increase. Up until that point, people only drove around their city. They had no need to go very far. But once road networks start increasing, when cities become connected, people have a need to drive much further. And of course, electric cars can’t go that far. So, gasoline cars became necessary. So that was one advantage gasoline cars had over electric cars at that point. The fact that they were expensive also disappeared after the First World War. In the Middle East, a lot of oil was discovered, and the price of oil came down. Gasoline became cheaper, gasoline cars became cheaper themselves. Gasoline cars that had been smelly, vibrated a lot and were noisy. Once the muffler was invented in about 1923, I think, all that disappeared as well. The smell vanished. The vibration mostly vanished. The noise disappeared. It became more popular. And of course, the crank disappeared when the electric starter motor was invented and cars started automatically. Once all that had happened, gasoline cars overtook electric cars. So, about 1922 I think was the peak of electric cars. And after that they tailed off. Some stayed on. A lot of delivery vehicles in cities remained electric, but most of them disappeared and then they were pretty much gone. Until the 1970s, 80s and 90s where there was a movement in California to try and bring them back.

 

The California government passed a law requiring oil companies and car companies to be much more environmentally friendly. So electric cars reappeared and companies put research money into these electric cars and they became popular again until the oil companies and the car companies sued the government of California saying that this law was unconstitutional or something and the law got repealed and all the electric cars disappeared. Because what’s more important, the environment or making lots of money in the short term? Obviously making lots of money in the short term, it seems. So, 1990s, electric cars disappeared again. Until now, when, thanks to a few companies. But I suppose, thanks largely to Elon Musk, the electric car has made a comeback. And now the electric car is something that most people want. And at some point soon, probably most cars will be electric cars. Electric cars, right now, they are cool, they are fast, they are spacious, they are luxurious. And that’s something that people want.

 

So, let’s have a little look at the future of the electric car. Oh, wow. Got to go a bit faster. By 2022, the price will have come down. So they’re probably about the same price as gasoline cars. By 2040, it’s expected that 60 percent of all cars will be gasoline … sorry … will be electric cars. They’re going to become faster. They’re going to be able to go further. Once we have charging stations all over the place and more advanced batteries, they’ll be able to drive much further than gasoline cars. There’s no real limit to their speed. They can go an awful lot faster. They’ll be much more spacious. And then, of course, when we introduce driverless cars as well, I mean, you’ll basically be sitting in a hotel room and you can watch a movie as you go somewhere. So, let’s have a last look at the environment before we finish.

 

People say electric cars are better for the environment. A lot of people say they might be, but what about the electricity you’re putting in them? Let’s have a quick look at that. Electric cars, yes, they are better than gasoline cars. The rare metals that are put into the batteries, most of those are mined in China. And that’s very bad for the environment. But that’s only because they’re mined in China, which is a horrible thing to say, but if China applied the environmental laws that other countries have to those mines, then that environmental damage would dissipate, would disappear. And even if the electricity comes from coal fired plants or oil-fired plants, they’re still better for the environment because they don’t really produce as much … as many emissions themselves. And of course, the lithium is a finite material, but batteries are advancing. There’s a battery that’s made out of silicon at the moment. So once batteries advance, we won’t have to use these rare metals, hopefully. And no matter what you say, gasoline cars produce more emissions. It’s just true. You can’t argue against that.

 

That’s electric cars. I hope one day I can afford one. I don’t have a car at all, actually, I use my bicycle, which is probably better for the environment all around. Anyway, if you go to my website, stevenaskew.com, you can find the script for this talk. You can find questions about it. Multiple-choice and essay type. You can find some sample answers and you can download all of that as word documents. You can also listen to the MP3 if you want. Thank you. I hope you found this interesting. And the more you practice your English, the better it will get. All right. Thank you. See you next time. Goodbye.