节目资讯
刊物:空中英语教室
日期:2013-12-13
难易度:Medium
关键字:frame, maintenance, grease, inspection, handlebar, wind resistance


























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(Music).
Hello, and welcome to Studio Classroom.
My name is Gabe.
And I'm Carolyn.
And your English will improve today as we continue to learn All About Bikes.
All right. We've learned about how some bikes are great for riding uphill or up
mountains.
Those are mountain bikes.
Some bikes are built for comfort to get you from your home to work or school.
Those are city bikes.
And of course, there are hybrid bikes, also called cross bikes.
Now what kind of bike do you have, or maybe what kind of bike do you want to
ride? Carolyn?
Well, I have a city bike.
It's pretty useful, fairly comfortable, but it doesn't look very nice.
But I think I would like to get a mountain bike so that I can go on all of the
amazing trails here in Taiwan.
Well, I have to say, I really enjoy having a mountain bike because the shocks
are great for the mountain roads,
and especially you never know what kind of holes will be in the roads.
Well, it's time for us to continue learning All About Bikes in today's lesson.
So let's get started.
All About Bikes.
Bikes built for speed.
If going fast is your goal, you'll want to choose a road bike.
These bikes are lighter than other bikes, so riders can go faster.
The downside is that their frames aren't made to handle riding over small holes
in the road.
But for pushing the limits of speed, nothing beats a road bike.
The style of handlebars normally used on road bikes forces riders to bend
forward while pedaling.
This position offers less wind resistance and makes faster speeds possible.
Road bikes come with more gears than other bikes, so riders can go up and down
steep mountain roads more easily.
Well, maybe a road bike is more what you need.
Let's learn all about this.
Let's talk about it together and read this together.
If going fast is your goal, you'll want to choose a road bike.
All right.
These are bikes built for speed as we can see in the title of this section.
Would you be interested in having a road bike, Carolyn?
Well, it would certainly get me where I want to go faster, but there are some
disadvantages to road bikes that I'm not so sure.
But there are a lot of good things as well.
We read: These bikes are lighter than other bikes, so riders can go faster.
So the bike that I have right now is pretty heavy, so it wouldn't go near as
fast as a road bike.
Well, road bikes are built for speed.
They're built to go very fast.
And so of course they can be quite expensive because they are light.
It costs more money to make a lighter bike.
I have a friend who has a bike made of titanium, very expensive material, but
it's very fast, a very convenient bike if you like speed.
That's right. And those are some good points.
The bike is much lighter; it can go faster.
But we continue reading.
The downside is that their frames aren't made to handle riding over small holes
in the road.
So there are some very good points about it, but some not so good points as well
like the downsides.
Let's look at that word: downside vs. upside.
Now what's a downside, Gabe?
Well, that's the negative aspect of something or something that is not positive.
So of course the positive thing about a road bike is that it can go fast.
That's the upside. OK.
That's the positive side.
The downside is that it's not built for going over holes in the road.
All right. Well, how else can you use the word "downside," Carolyn?
Well, you can use it when you are just describing lots of positive things about
something, and then you say:
Oh, but the downside is... and then something negative, so.
Maybe you find a great deal shopping online (if you remember our online shopping
article), and you get a great deal.
But the downside is you have to wait three weeks before your items will arrive.
That's a great point.
Or maybe you have just been working at a job that keeps you in an office all day
long.
The upside is that you have a good salary.
The downside is that you don't have as much free time as you would like.
All right. So there are upsides and downsides to almost everything in life.
Well, we have an upside to this sentence.
Of course we have a key word there straight from our Word Bank.
It is "frame." We're talking about a bike frame here.
As you learned last month, frame could also refer to the frame of your body.
But here it's a bike frame.
That's right.
So this gives the bike its shape, its structure.
It holds everything together.
And so bikes can have different shape frames depending on the type of bike you
are interested in getting.
So we'll learn a little bit more about the road bike here.
That's right. It has a nice frame.
Now what else in life has a frame?
Well, I can think of bed frames.
They kind of keep the shape of the bed.
They keep the bed sturdy.
Your bed frame is very important.
Of course here we're talking about bike frames.
And the bike frame for a road bike isn't made to go over small holes in the
road.
Well, let's continue.
But for pushing the limits of speed, nothing beats a road bike.
And we see that phrase again: nothing beats...
If you remember yesterday, we used that to describe a mountain bike going over
rocky trails.
But here we're using it to describe this road bike because nothing beats a road
bike when it comes to speed.
Now there's another great phrase in this sentence: pushing the limits.
To push limits, what does that mean, Gabe?
Well, everything has limits or boundaries. OK.
And so if you want to push the limits of speed, that means you want to go faster
than what people may expect.
All right. You want to push the limits.
What else can you push the limits of?
Well, I think sometimes we as humans like to push our own limits.
We think we can only do so much, but it's good to challenge ourselves, to push
our own limits.
That's right.
So many athletes push their limits when they go to the Olympics.
It's very demanding, very challenging, and they have to push themselves to the
limit.
Well, talking about speed and road bikes, we continue reading:
The style of handlebars normally used on road bikes forces riders to bend
forward while pedaling.
So you aren't sitting up straight like you might on a normal bike.
You are forced to bend forward, over top of the bike.
That's right, using your handlebars.
And you use your handlebars to control or handle the bike.
Of course you've seen that verb "handle" in today's lesson and yesterday's
lesson many times.
That is to control something.
And you control your bike with the handlebars.
That's right.
Now why would you want to be bent over your bike?
This position offers less wind resistance and makes faster speeds possible.
And this is a good thing if you want a speedy bike.
OK. What is wind resistance?
That is when the wind makes it hard for you to go fast.
All right. So if you have a bike like this, there is less wind resistance.
All right. Now let's continue.
Road bikes come with more gears than other bikes, so riders can go up and down
steep mountain roads more easily.
All right. So that is a great thing about having a road bike.
Well, let's continue learning something with Steve and Ken in the Information
Cloud.
And then we'll join Michelle in the Language Lab.
Friends, today's Info Cloud lesson is for all of you who just can't seem to get
excited about learning English.
May we introduce to you the sticky language ball?
For its core, pick something you enjoy doing, a hobby, a sport, anything that
gets you excited.
The idea is to take the passion you feel for one thing and transfer it to
something that you don't feel so passionate about, like maybe English.
Right. And it was this biking article that reminded me of when one of my
teachers first challenged me to make a sticky language ball.
I loved biking, so I made the names of bicycle parts the core of the ball.
Then as the next layer, use those words to create simple sentences.
With tire, for example, you might say the tire is round, or the tire is flat.
Exactly.
Then, after mastering those, I began to stick on the next layer.
Studying a foreign language isn't easy.
But if you connect it with something you enjoy, I think you can make some real
progress.
So friends, what are you passionate about?
Use that passion and create your own sticky language ball.
(Chinese).
Hi, everyone. I'm Michelle.
(Chinese).