I was very interested to read about Nissan’s new electric car in this article in the Guardian earlier this month. I like the idea of electric cars because they are clean and also very quiet.
There were some really interesting words and expressions in this article right from the beginning:
Sunderland in running to make five-door hatchback
‘In running‘ in this case is a shortened form of the expression ‘in the running‘. If you are ‘in the running‘ for something, you are part of a competition for some kind of prize or goal.
There’s another interesting piece of competition-related vocabulary in the first paragraph:
Nissan has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s first mass-market electric car — a five-door hatchback called Leaf which its Sunderland plant is vying to build for the European market.
‘Vying‘ also means competing in order to achieve something. So, to rephrase this sentence, we could say the Sunderland factory is competing with the other factories in Europe for the right to produce this car. The author also uses the word ‘plant‘ in this paragraph to mean ‘factory’.
The article says that the car would produce no carbon emissions but it’s important to mention that most forms of producing electricity at the moment produce lots of carbon and other forms of pollution. This means the car would not be completely carbon neutral.
There is another interesting word later on when it is mentioned that:
it [the car] would be similarly priced to other family-sized cars in the £10,000-£15,000 bracket.
In this example ‘bracket‘ means the category or group of cars that fall within that price range.
There are a few different words used in this article to describe different kinds of cars. When I saw the word ‘saloon cars‘, it started me thinking. There are a few words related to cars that are quite different in U.K. and U.S. English. Here they are:
- bonnet (U.K.) – hood (U.S.)
- boot (U.K.) – trunk (U.S.)
- petrol (U.K.) – gas (U.S.)
- saloon car (U.K.) – sedan (U.S.)
- estate car (U.K.) – station wagon (U.S.)
Here in Bali, it’s best to drive a 4WD (four wheel drive) vehicle because the roads are in quite poor condition and are often flooded during the rainy season.
What kind of cars are most common in your country?