Welcome to the Five Minute Theory Podcast. This is a show where I give you bite sized chunks of theory goodness to help you learn, understand and pass your theory test. As always, I am your host, Terry Cook of TCDrive and I'm delighted to be giving you some knowledge. And I've got a cracking show for you today. We are looking at theory test questions. Specifically, in fact, we're looking at two that are quite similar around fuel consumption. So, we're looking at that and at the end of the show I will give you my resource of the week as always. Before we go any further, I want to let you know something at the minute. There are awards taking place for driving instructors. So, if you're listening to the show and you have a driving instructor, you could consider voting for your driving instructor. And the best way to do that is to go to the website. It's intelligentinstructor.co.uk. I will put a link in the Show Notes. I will also put a link on my website, TCDrive.co.uk. So, you can head over to either of those websites or you can go to the show notes and click the link there. So, if you have an instructor that is helping you and you think that that instructor is worthy of a vote, then by all means, go find that link, answer a few questions and explain why you are voting for your instructor. If you don't have an instructor and you would like someone to vote for, consider me consider this podcast. If this podcast has helped you with your theory at any point, perhaps you would consider voting for that in the awards and then go to the same place again. You'll find the link in the show notes or can head over to intelligentinstructor.co.uk. But as I said, if you've got an instructor that you think deserves that award, make sure you're voting for them. Anyway, on to today's question. Now, they’re two very similar questions, but they're phrased differently, which is why I've kind of put them together. So, the first question is, what's most likely to increase fuel consumption? So, I'll give you that question again. What is most likely to increase fuel consumption? What does that actually mean? Basically, the amount of car the fuel uses. If you're increasing fuel consumption, you are increasing the amount of fuel the car uses. So, you use fuel quicker, which is bad for the environment, and costs you more money. So, what's more likely to do with that? Well, the four options given here are:
I suppose technically, they all could contribute in one way or another to fuel consumption, but the big one is harsh braking and accelerating. We need to be planning better when we're driving, when you use your gas, your gas pedal, when you use it aggressively, that's what burns the most fuel and it's the same when you're braking. It's these types of things that are going to use the most fuel, whereas poor steering control as far as it could lead to a little bit more in fuel consumption, accelerate around bends, again, you are accelerating and you shouldn't really be accelerating around bends, but it's not going to have a massive impact on that level of fuel that you're using. And staying in the high gears generally actually reduces your fuel consumption. So, harsh braking and accelerating, we want to make the drive as smooth as possible, not just so we're using less fuel, but also so it's a more pleasant drive. But I did mention two questions. So, we've got another question that's similar but kind of the opposite way around. So, this time it's what can you expect if you drive using rapid acceleration and heavy braking? The options are:
Well, again, if you were unsure of this, you could rule out some of these answers straight away. So, if you're using rapid acceleration, harsh braking we've just discussed, you shouldn't be doing that. We should be making the drive smooth. So, because of that, it's not going to increase road safety, so we can rule out that option. It's not going to reduce exhaust emissions because we're increasing them by using more gas. It's the same reason it's not going to reduce pollution. So therefore, it will increase fuel consumption by using rapid acceleration. And I would swap the word rapid for aggressive and using heavy braking, it's always going to increase the fuel consumption. And if you want to use less fuel and therefore help the environment and therefore spend less money, then be more gentle with your braking and your acceleration. And the big way we can do that is just to plan better. So, if we're going down the road and we can see a lot of parked cars and it looks like it's a bit more tight than usual, start reducing your speed a little bit earlier. And again, by that I don't necessarily mean reducing from 30 to 10. I mean you start easing off your gas pedal a little bit early, you see, come into a nice smooth stop if necessary, rather than a jerky one, making the whole journey a little bit smoother. So, we're planning ahead and planning early what we're going to do to reduce that harshness around the brake and acceleration. So, I hope that explains those for you and I hope you found those useful and I hope that you can take that forward through to your theory test and through to your driving as well, because that will actually help you on your driving test if you can make the drive more smooth. As always, I do have a resource of the week for you and this time it's kind of a group of resources because the theory Test is based around three books. It's based around the Highway Code, which I've recommended previously. It's based around Driving the Essential Skills and it's based around know your traffic signs. They're the three basic books that the Theory Test is based around. So, I would advise getting stuck into all of those. And again, just to clarify, the Theory Test isn't just a gateway so that you can book your driving test. Your Theory test is there to help you learn to drive, it's there to help you become a better driver and keep safe on the road. So, by having these books, by dipping into them, even when you pass your theory, by dipping into them, then, now and again, then you're going to become a better and safer driver and run less risk of having a collision and less risk of getting points on your license. So, the three books are the Highway Code, Driving the Essential Skills and Know your Traffic signs. They're the recommended resource of the week. But as always, you can check out more of my stuff over my website tcdrive.co.uk and can check out all the previous podcasts there as well. So go and check out. But for now, I'm going to just say to you stay safe and drive safer.
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AuthorTerry Cook. Archives
September 2023
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