Clock up

Have you ever broken the law? Maybe even for something minor like parking in the wrong place at the wrong time? I think most people have made the occasional mistake when driving but certainly not as many as the man in this article on the BBC News website.

There’s some great driving-related vocabulary in the article, too. The first interesting word is in the second paragraph where the author mentions that the offender’s car was ‘weaving‘ close to other cars. By ‘weaving‘, the writer means that the car was moving from side to side on the road.

The third paragraph is full of interesting vocabulary, too:

The serial offender clocked up further offences for speeding, driving on the hard shoulder, running a set of red lights and failing to stop for police.

A ‘serial offender‘ is a person who commits a lot of offences, and ‘clock up’ means accumulate. We often use ‘clock up‘ to talk about acquiring or accumulating experience. For example, a trainee pilot needs to clock up some flying hours before he can get his licence.

The ‘hard shoulder‘ is the empty part of the road by the side where you are not supposed to drive and if you ‘run a red light‘, you drive through a set of traffic lights while the red light is showing.

In the next paragraph, there’s another interesting phrasal verb. To ‘pull over‘ means to move your car to the side of the road and stop.

The last interesting word is ‘spree‘, which we have already seen before in this article.

People here in Bali don’t drive very fast but it’s still quite dangerous on the roads here because the traffic laws aren’t enforced very strictly.

Are the roads safe in your country?

Today’s image is by Ivan Prole.