Daily Dose of English 15
Biking
Daily Dose of English 15
Intermediate
Hello, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about biking, riding a bike, or going for a bike ride, all of which are ways to talk about riding one of those two-wheeled mechanisms to get around. I think it's a pretty common word, but if you didn't know what a bike was, that's what it is. I'm specifically talking about the non-motorized ones, so a regular bike, bicycle, if you will. I think bikes are absolutely fantastic. They have to be one of the best modes of transportation that exist. They're so efficient in terms of space and energy, and they're just so handy in general. However, regrettably, they're not as useful as they could be or should be in most of the world. Well, a lot of the world. A lot of the world is not really built with bikes in mind, sadly, but there is so much potential because they are so efficient in terms of, like I said, space and power. You use human power to power them, after all, so if you have a nice big breakfast, you can bike better, I guess. They're just generally so useful for getting around because you can go at a good enough speed to get anywhere you want to go. Specifically in cities, I think that they are most useful because cities are relatively close together. There's nothing that is that far away when you're in a city, or there shouldn't be anything that's that far away. You should be able to get around with a bike, and that to me is what makes a good city because things are close enough that a bike is useful because you don't really want to be going however many miles away, 20 miles away, to do something in a city because it ideally should be closer. There's definitely exceptions. There's some things that are going to be far away, but for your general day-to-day use of or general day-to-day being, I guess, bikes are one of the most effective ways, and they don't really get stuck in traffic is what the nice thing is because cars are so space inefficient. They don't use space very well. There's a ton of traffic, and that's just a reality. We can't really fix traffic because of how inefficient cars are in terms of the space they use. One person takes up so much space if they're in a car, but it's very, very small if they're on a bike. That's actually one of the main reasons I use a bike. I prefer to use a bike even though I live in a very large city with lots and lots of cars is because there is so much traffic that I would go way slower overall using a car. Cars can go faster, but in a lot of places, they don't go faster. They are much, much slower than bikes just because you have to constantly wait in traffic, and one of the nice things about being in a pretty large city nowadays is that there are what are called bike-share systems, and that's where all around the city, there are stations for these bikes, and at each station, there's, oh, I don't know, 10 to 15 bikes at a given time, and so you can go and just use a bike from there, go to your location, and leave the bike at a new station. You do have to typically have an account and pay some sort of fee so that they can redistribute the bikes. They can take them to where there's more of them and bring them to places where there's less bikes, and you can get a lot of good use out of it that way, but there's also a lot of, I guess, power. No, not power. There's a lot of benefit to owning your own bike as well because you never have to go find one. That's the big thing. I know that I've definitely been stranded without a bike in the evening. Stranded is when you are somewhere, but you can't really leave for whatever reason. A common way to use it is stranded on a deserted island, and that's usually a conversation starter. What would you do if you were stranded on a deserted island? Or in my case, what would you do if you were stranded without a bike? And so stranded is when you don't have access to something to get you out of a place. You're stuck in a place, basically. You can get stranded without a bike if you're relying on the bike share system to have enough of them. If you're in a place where it's very popular to take a bike from, then you're much more likely to become stranded. Owning your own bike can allow you to avoid that issue by always having access to your own personal bike. Plus, if you're a big fan of bikes, you can have a nicer bike, a taller bike, a smaller bike, whatever you need, depending on your specific needs. Because while bikes are very, very useful for getting around, they're also forms of you can use them for exercise or even for pleasure. You can go out on a nice bike ride, not to go anywhere, but to just enjoy the outside, to enjoy the weather. A lot of places have bicycle paths where you can go through sort of meadows or maybe fields and enjoy a bit of the scenery or the city on your bike. And you typically want to have a bike that is comfortable and easy to ride if you want to do that because if you're on a bike that's uncomfortable and not easy to ride, you're going to be uncomfortable, you're going to have a hard time riding, you're going to be stiff and it's not nearly as much fun, which is the whole point of a leisure ride, if you will. Leisure for leisure, that's another good word. And then you can also use a bike for exercise. A lot of people love to do this. This is actually possibly in some places more popular than even using a bike to get around. A lot of people have nice, what are typically called, road bikes, no, road bikes are for riding around normally. What are the ones for going longer distances? There's like racing bikes, I don't actually really know. There's a word for a bike that somebody takes out to go longer distances, they go for a couple hours on one day or another day or whatever. But then there's also bikes like mountain bikes, which are a part fun, part exercise where you go up onto a mountain and you bike up and you bike down, that's a lot more difficult because you constantly have to be aware of where you're going and watch where your tires are so you don't fall because it's a lot easier to fall. And then there's a lot of other kinds of bikes. BMX bikes are more like tricks. People do tricks on BMX bikes and almost more like skateboards. There's also that cycling, biking sport in the Olympics where they're in a ring, it's fairly small and so they're constantly on their side. I don't know what that's called, but that's another kind of biking, typically for sport or for exercise. And so there's a lot of different ways to use bikes for really whatever you want to do. But the way that I always use them, I think 95% of the time is for getting around places. And there's even a ton of different kinds of bikes for that because if you are getting around the city, you often have to do things. Maybe you have to carry a backpack or you're shopping. And so it might be nice to have a cargo bike, which typically has a large bucket in the front where you can put stuff or the back even. And those bikes can be useful as well for getting stuff around, like I said. Or if you have kids, you might have a bike with a little trailer on the back. I remember this from when I was very young, probably, oh, I must have been like five or six years old. And I would get in the back of this trailer thing that would hook up to I think my dad's bike and he would take me around. And you'd be in this little section because I couldn't ride a bike yet. I was too small. But I still needed to get places or wherever it was. And so I've got a lot of memories of just generally using bikes as useful tools to get around. I would go to school on my bike when I was pretty young. I'd go with my parents. And then at a certain point, when I was probably 17 or 18, I biked all the way to my high school, even though it was kind of far away. I think it was like a 20-minute ride, at least 20 minutes on the bike to go there and back. But I went to school downtown and parking was horrible. It was very difficult to find parking. And so biking was the best way to get parking. And so I did that a lot just because I didn't like to look for parking or pay for parking. I remember that at one point, it would be like 9 at least per day, which was kind of a lot of money if you're in school per day. And so biking was just a lot more effective for what I needed to do. So yeah, that's my talk on biking. I don't really have anything else to say. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a few words here and there. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen today and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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