Learning to Drive
You have to be seventeen before you can drive a car in Britain, but you can ride a moped when you are sixteen. In Britain, you can learn to drive a car by taking lessons with the instructor or any experienced driver. This means that learning to drive is not too expensive. A lot of young people learn in their parents’ car. There is also a new written part to the driving test which you have to pass before driving on your own.
This is an L plate (pronounced “ell plate”). It must be put on the back and front of a car, if you have not passed your driving-test yet.
Find similarities and differences in learning to drive in Britain and in
Ukraine. Make a list of both.
Read the text:
Coaches
Coaches are long-distance buses. Travelling by coach is cheaper than by train: most tickets cost 70 per cent of the equivalent train fare. Because of the difference in price, about 10.5 million people a year use the coach. Coaches go to more remote or isolated places than trains.
Define each word in the line below and say what other words are
associated with money. Continue the line of words. Make up sentences of your own to demonstrate these words’ difference in meaning. Find three more homonyms to the word “coach”.
Cost, fare, price, fine…
Read the text:
Commuting to Work
Many people in Britain live a long way from their work. They often travel by train from the suburbs into the city centre to work. These people are called commuters. Some people travel more than 200 miles every day and spend up to two hours going to work and two hours going home. Train tickets may appear to be expensive (£ 2,500 a year for an annual season ticket from Brighton to London), but this form of transport is a fast and environmentally friendly alternative to using a car.
On some trains, there are study clubs which offer language lessons to commuters on their way to and from work. People who don’t drive to work are able to read a newspaper or a book. Some commuters even get out their laptop computers and do their work. When you drive there is no possibility to do so but at the same time commuting can be rather stressful today.
Listen to the monologue offered by Nick from Career Journey site about
negative effects of commuting (see Appendix on page 30) and answer the questions on the topic.
Commuting to Work, a long commute can have significant impact on your life:
What are the negative effects of commuting, presented by the speaker?
How can contemporary people avoid commuting to jobs?
Why are people advised to avoid commuting to work?
PART 3
Traffic Issues
Now you are going to read about differences between
a) a Railcard,
b) a Season ticket
c) a Railpass
Figure out how people should distinguish between them.
Railcard & Season Ticket vs. Railpass
There is, especially amongst tourists to the UK, confusion between the difference between a Rail Card, Season Tickets and a Rail Pass. Rail Saver has gathered the following information to help clear up this confusion and explain as simply as possible the difference between a RailCard and a RailPass.
Rail Card
In addition to the large number and variety of short-term or localised promotional fares that are available to passengers on the British railway network there are many permanent concessionary fare schemes available to passengers that take the form
of Railcards.
A Rail Card is able to be used by specific groups of frequent train commuters to pay a lower price for their train tickets. There are three primary rail cards available in the UK all offering at least 30% off the fare you would have paid had you not held a rail card.