Let's Learn English! Topic: Speed! 🏎️🏃⚡ (Lesson Only)

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.

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, 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,

we measure how fast you are going by 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.

In some places, though, we go by kilometers per hour.

This is the Canadian spelling of kilometres.

It's not a typo.

And the short form is at the top.

And so this is how many kilometres you would go

if you drove at that speed for one hour.

So if I drove at 80 km

per hour would go exactly 80 kilometres.

At the end of the hour, I will have gone 80 kilometres.

That's a good verb tense for you, by the way.

You will have gone.

So again, miles per hour, if you're in, I

think, the UK or the United States and maybe

a few other countries, and kilometres per hour in

most of the other parts of the world.

I don't want to get into

an argument about the metric system.

By the way, you will hear people informally sometimes say kilometres

an hour, like I was going 80 km an hour.

The correct term is kilometers per hour,

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 kilometres 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.

When you speed, you risk getting a speeding ticket.

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, 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.

A 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, Jen might say, whoa, how fast was he going?

And 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.

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.

If 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.

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, you can always go, in my

opinion, you can go a few kilometres 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 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 100km an hour, so I

slowed down and just did 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, it's understood that

I'm talking about miles per hour because Brent's American.

If you said Bob was going 60, it's understoodthat

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.

So it makes like an sound.

Right, Speedometer.

This speedometer says that this person

is doing 70 kilometres 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, I push

the pedal all the way down.

I think my lawnmower does 7 or 8

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 hundred meter dash, 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 because you would be doing 160 kilometres 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.

And we also use this phrase in everyday English.

So someone at a meeting might

say, okay, 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, 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.

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 will take a while,

but it will certainly make it cool because then I

can just 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,

that goes really, really fast to accelerate.

So I'm not sure if you have

seen any kind of car racing.

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 a

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, because when

you push that pedal, it makes the car go faster.

So when you accelerate, it means that you 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 want to 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, 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.

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.

And whenever I was going down,

the car would pick up speed.

So I wasn't trying to go faster, I

wasn't pushing 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.

Nope, 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 to 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, 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 the person in front of

me is only doing 65 km per hour.

When that happens, I usually speed

up, usually pass the person.

So I make my car go faster and I pass them.

I speed up to 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.

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 thing. 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, 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.

It's a bump.

You might come out of your seat a little bit.

But there are a few places, local

town, where they have installed speed bumps.

They do look like this.

They put yellow or orange paint on them, reflective

yellow paint so that you can see them.

And they're usually in areas where there

are schools, often close to schools.

They will put speed bumps to 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.

As 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 hors race,

and you might say to your friend, the

horse that won was as fast as Lightning.

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 as fast as lightning.

They were doing 150 kilometers per hour.

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 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.

So I was okay, but 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 I'm certainly not that fast now.

At a snail's pace.

So a snail, 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.

Or I waited in line, 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.

This is my least favourite 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 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.

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 and all of the sudden

you see a police officer waving you to pull over,

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,

I don't know if you remember, that 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.

And then I drove by doing the speed

limit at that point and one of the

police cars pulled out and pulled me over.

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.

And 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.

And then I had to pay the ticket within 15.

So police will sometimes use a radar gun in

order to, yeah, catch people who are speeding.

So 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.

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 and toppled it over.

Like they've, they've come with a

saw and they've cut it off.

So I would say that they

are not very popular speed cameras.

This is a speed trap.

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 what 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.

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 because I.

I don't like it when people speed, But I don't.

I don't like getting a ticket.

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.

If you go somewhere where there's an echo, you can

kind of get a sense of the speed of sound.

Your voice travels and then bounces off

something and comes back to you.

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.

I'm gonna say shot in the dark,

somewhere around 600 miles an hour.

I don't actually know.

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

if 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.

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 4km away, I see

it at almost the same time you turn it on.

There's no way to be able to tell.

And then in the chat, I see hafiyya

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, 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.

Yeah, I think the bus blows up.

I'm not 100% sure.

Can't remember the movie.

But this is my last slide.

So 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.