“Public Transportation”
In a world with so many types of vehicles… buses, trains, light rail, airplanes, even bicycles… it’s strange that so many people prefer to travel by car. Cars cost a lot of money to drive, and they use a lot of space on the road. When everyone is trying to get to work, being in a car can be quite stressful. So why are they so popular?
Cars are certainly a status symbol in most parts of the world. And this is unfortunate. Buses and trains create less pollution, and they’re much more fuel efficient. Also, if you can sit on a bus and look out the window, your day will be far more relaxing!
Rafael and Lily talk about the pros and cons of public transportation in today’s English lesson about getting around.
Lily: Sorry I’m late. I had to ride the bus here, and it took forever.
Rafael: You don’t have a car?
Lily: No. Why? Do you?
Rafael: I have to tell you. I think buses just make things slower.
Lily: They can be slow sometimes, but actually I really like taking public transportation. The extra time kind of gives you a little bit of time to unwind. It’s also a lot more fuel efficient than driving a car around. It lowers pollution, reduces your carbon footprint, that kind of thing. It’s nice.
Rafael: That’s true. But don’t you ever get tired of having to wait so long to get places?
Lily: I think that, in this case, the pros definitely outweigh the cons. Do you take buses? Do you do public transportation, like light rail, or anything like that?
Rafael: I haven’t in a long time. What’s your favorite form of public transportation?
Lily: Well, I really like light rail. I think that that’s definitely the fastest and the easiest form. I think it’s important to do one’s part, and just take the train every once in a while. It can’t hurt. Right?
Rafael: Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime.
Lily: Yeah.
Lily arrives late for her plans with Rafael. She traveled by bus, and it took a long time. Rafael wonders why she didn’t just drive a car, because he feels like buses make travel so much slower. He doesn’t really understand why Lily is OK with public transportation.
Lily describes a number of things that she appreciates about getting around by bus and light rail. When she’s not driving, she can just relax. She likes riding in a vehicle that can take a lot of people to one place, because it’s better for the environment. It creates less pollution than a bunch of cars would on the road, and Lily wants to lessen her carbon footprint, too.
Do you use public transportation? What kinds of public transportation do you think your city needs?
Comparatives and Superlatives
Lily thinks that light rail is “the fastest and the easiest” form of public transportation. She uses two superlatives.
Comparatives and superlatives help us compare people, places, or things.
There are two ways to form comparatives. For most long adjectives, which have three or more syllables, we use more, as in, “Sarah is more beautiful than Martha.” With short adjectives, which have only one or two syllables, we add -er to the end of the word, as in, “Jacob is smarter than Ed.” For short adjectives ending in y, like “happy,” we drop the “y” and add -ier, as in, “I am happier now that I quit my job.”
Similarly, we form superlatives with the most or by adding -est, depending on the length of the adjective. With long adjectives we say, “He is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.” With short adjectives we say, “Johnny is the fastest runner on the team.” For short adjectives ending in y, we drop the “y” and add -iest, as in, “She is the prettiest girl in the world.”
In Lily’s example, she took the adjective fast and changed it to “the fastest.” She took the adjective easy, dropped the y and added -iest to make it “the easiest.”
Which is correct, “Mark is the healthier person in our family,” or, “Mark is the healthiest person in our family”?