Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 826, Shopping for a Used Car.
This is English as a Second Language podcast, episode 826.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles California, United States of America.
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This episode is a dialogue about buying or shopping for a used or old car.
Let's get started.
Do you want to go with me to test drive a car I'm thinking of buying?
Sure.
Which dealership are we going to?
I'm not buying a used car from a dealership.
I'm buying it from a private party.
Dealerships rip you off.
Are you sure about that?
My sister bought a certified used car from a dealership and she even got a one-year warranty.
She's very happy with it.
Dealerships jack up the price.
Buying from a private party means getting a better deal.
If you say so, what kind of car is it and how much is the owner asking for it?
It's a McHugh Racer and the owner is asking $12,000, $3,000 below Blue Book value.
That is a good price.
In fact, that's too good a price.
Doesn't that raise some red flags?
Like what?
Well, the car could have been totaled and is now considered salvage.
Its odometer could have been rolled back.
It could have major mechanical problems.
You can be skeptical, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
If this guy wants to sell his car for much less than its value, who am I to ask questions?
You'll do a title search and ask to see the pink slip before you buy it, right?
I think you'd better stay here.
With you along, I see this great deal going up in smoke.
Mario begins our dialogue by saying to Danica do you want to go with me to test drive a car I'm thinking of buying?
To test drive is a phrasal verb meaning to drive a car that you are thinking of buying in order to see if you like it or not.
It's sort of doing research by driving the car and seeing if it's something you like.
Usually you have to go to a place that sells cars what we would call a car dealership and they would allow you to go and drive the car.
They have to go with you, somebody from the dealership has to go with you, but you can go and test drive it.
You can see if you like the car or not.
The word test can be used to mean an examination like in school, but it can also be used to try to experiment with something.
Danica says sure, which dealership are we going to?
Mario says, I'm not buying a used car from a dealership.
A used car would be a car that is not new.
It might not be old.
It could be just from last year.
But if someone else has owned it before you, if you didn't buy it new, then it is a used car.
Mario doesn't want to buy a used car from a dealership.
In the United States, used car dealerships have a very bad reputation.
The idea is that they're going to try to give you a bad car, give you a bad deal, cheat you somehow.
Mario says, I'm buying this used car from a private party.
If you don't buy a car from a company that sells cars a business that sells new or used cars, a dealership then you buy it from an individual person who's selling his or her car, and we call that person, in this case, a private party.
I'm going to buy a car from a private party means I'm going to buy it from an individual.
It's not a party like you're going to drink and dance and listen to music.
The word party here just means person.
Dealerships, Mario says, rip you off.
To rip someone off...
Or to rip off someone means to trick them into paying more for something than it's really worth.
And remember I said that's the reputation used car dealers.
Dealers are people who work for a dealership.
Used car dealers have a reputation for ripping people off, for giving them a bad car or charging them too much money.
Danica says, are you sure about that?
My sister bought a certified used car from a dealership, and she even got a one-year warranty.
A certified used car is a car where the company, the dealership, gives you a piece of paper and says this car is good.
It's in working order.
Everything works on it.
Often certified C-E-R-T-I-F-I-E-D means that it is somehow official that someone with power or authority said yes, this is what we are saying.
It is.
Now, of course, you may not believe that person, but that's what certified typically means.
So a certified used car would be a car that says, Someone guarantees.
They say, if something goes wrong, we will fix it.
That guarantee, when we talk about a specific physical product like a car, is usually called a warranty.
W-A-R-R-A-N-T-Y.
A warranty is an agreement that a company makes with you where they say we will fix or repair anything that happens to your car over a certain amount of time.
A one-year warranty would mean if the car somehow has a problem in six months or in 10 months, we will fix it and we will not charge you any money.
Danica says her sister has a car she bought from a dealership that has a one-year warranty on it and she's very happy with it.
Mario says dealerships jack up the price.
To Jack up the price means to increase the price significantly, often over a very short amount of time and, in this case, more importantly, to a level that is much higher than what the business should be charging for something, much more than it's really worth.
Although, of course, this has a strange conception of economics.
Some people think things are worth something objective, that you can somehow scientifically determine how much something is worth something.
But value, as most economists will tell you, is always relative.
It depends on how much someone's willing to pay you.
Well, the phrase to jack up the price is describing a company that will increase the price of something much more than what many people think they should.
Mario says buying from a private party means getting a better deal.
A deal here means a good bargain where you get something for a good price.
Danica says if you say so.
Notice the way she says that, if you say, so is often an expression we use when we don't actually believe what the other person is saying, but you're not going to argue with them.
Well, okay, if you say so.
You may not really believe them, but you're not going to continue arguing about it.
Danica says, what kind of car is it and how much is the owner asking for it?
So she's asking what kind of car Mario wants to test drive.
Mario says it's a McHugh Racer and the owner is asking $12,000.
McHugh Racer is a wonderful car.
You should try to get one for yourself.
The owner is asking $12,000.
That's how much he wants for the car.
Mario says this is $3,000 below Blue Book value.
The Blue Book is a publication in the United States that lists all of the used cars and how much they're generally considered to be worth.
The blue book value is used by a lot of insurance companies to estimate how much a car is worth.
Why is it called the blue book?
Well, originally it was probably a book with a blue cover.
But when someone says blue book value, they mean the price that comes from this book that's published every year.
Now I'm sure it's online.
That gives you the value of a car, the average value of a car, including used cars.
Danica says that's a good price.
In fact, it's too good a price.
She means it seems too low.
Maybe there's a problem with the car.
Doesn't that raise some red flags, she asks.
The expression to raise, R-A-I-S-E, some red flags, F-L-A-G-S, means that something is suspicious, that it makes you wonder whether there might be a problem.
It makes you doubt the quality of something.
Mario says, like what?
He doesn't know what the problem Danica is referring to.
Danica says, well, the car could have been totaled and is now considered salvage.
To total T-O-T-A-L as a verb means in this case that the car is ruined, that the car got into a bad accident and basically isn't worth very much money anymore.
Salvage, S-A-L-V-A-G-E, is something that you are able to save from an accident.
So Danica is saying maybe this car was in an accident and it's not really worth the $12,000.
She also says that the odometer could have been rolled back.
The odometer O-D-O-M-E-T-E-R is the little machine in the car that tells you how many miles the car has been driven.
It's illegal in most states to change the odometer to make it seem as though the car hasn't been used very much.
When you change the odometer to decrease the amount of miles on it, we call that rolling it back.
In general, the phrasal verb to roll, R-O-L-L, back means to decrease the value of something.
It can sometimes mean to return something to the state or the situation where it was before.
We may make some changes in our website, and then we discover some problems.
So we roll back to the previous version of the website.
Danica says the car could have major or very serious mechanical problems.
Mechanical problems would be problems with how the engine works, for example, or how it is built.
Mario says you can be skeptical, you can be doubting, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Mario doesn't believe Danica.
He thinks this is going to be a good deal.
He says, if this guy wants to sell his car for much less than its value, who am I to ask questions?
That phrase, who am I to do something, means I don't have the right or I shouldn't ask questions.
Danica says you'll do a title search and ask to see the pink slip before you buy it, right?
A title search is the process of seeing who legally owns the car.
All cars that are driven in the United States out on the road have to be registered with usually the state government.
And so you can do a title search.
You can see who owned the car and make sure that there weren't any problems with the car.
The pink slip is an expression we use for the certificate of ownership, what we call the title certificate of a car.
It's a piece of paper, a document, to show who actually owns the car.
Obviously, if you go and steal a car and then you try to sell it to another person, you usually won't have the certificate document, the official document that says that you're the owner.
That official document, that title document, is called a pink slip because probably in some states the actual piece of paper used to be pink.
I don't think it's pink in most states anymore, but we still use that expression.
Mario says I think you'd better stay here, meaning I don't think you should go with me, with you along, meaning with you coming with me.
I see this great deal going up in smoke.
The expression to go up in smoke means that it will be ruined.
It will be wasted.
It will disappear and no longer be available.
Of course, we're not talking about the car actually burning.
He's using this as a metaphor to say that the situation will be ruined.
The deal will no longer be a good deal if Danica comes with.
Mario wants to believe that this is a good car.
Danica is trying to give him some advice about being careful about the car.
But Mario isn't interested in listening.
Now let's listen ourselves to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
Do you want to go with me to test drive a car I'm thinking of buying?
Sure.
Which dealership are we going to?
I'm not buying a used car from a dealership.
I'm buying it from a private party.
Dealerships rip you off.
Are you sure about that?
My sister bought a certified used car from a dealership, and she even got a one-year warranty.
She's very happy with it.
Dealerships jack up the price.
Buying from a private party means getting a better deal.
If you say so.
What kind of car is it, and how much is the owner asking for it?
It's a McHugh Racer, and the owner is asking $12,000, $3,000 below Blue Book value.
That is a good price.
In fact, that's too good a price.
Doesn't that raise some red flags?
Like what?
Well, the car could have been totaled and is now considered salvage.
Its odometer could have been rolled back.
It could have major mechanical problems.
You can be skeptical, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
If this guy wants to sell his car for much less than its value, who am I to ask questions?
You'll do a title search and ask to see the pink slip before you buy it, right?
I think you'd better stay here.
With you along, I see this great deal going up in smoke.
This script was written by our certified script writer, Dr. Lucy Say.
Our scripts come with a one-year warranty.
If your English breaks down in the next year, just give us a call.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2012 by the Center for Educational Development.
