Electric cars: Greener, cleaner driving 69Predicting content
Read only the irst paragraph of the reading text, then make three predictions about the
content of the entire text.
Reading text
1 Humans and their cars constituted the greatest love afair of the past century. Cars represent
freedom, mobility, power, and status. Most people who don’t have a car want one, and those who
already own one would like a newer, bigger, faster, and fancier model. When one considers that
in the United States the number of vehicles is increasing faster than the population, it looks like
the love afair with the automobile has turned into an addiction.
U.S. household and vehicle statistics
No. of registered
No. of households vehicles Total vehicle miles
Year (thousands) (thousands) (millions)
1950 43,554 43,501 458,246
1980 80,776 139,831 1,527,295
2000 104,705 213,300 2,746,925
2010 117,538 239,812 2,966,494
source Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 31, Chapter 8, Oice of Energy Eiciency
and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, 2010.
2 Statistics on car ownership are staggering. Between 1950 and 2010, the number of U.S. house-
holds nearly tripled, but the number of registered vehicles per household increased by 551 per-
cent and the total miles driven by nearly 650 percent. Even though car sales declined almost 28
percent between 2007 and 2009 due to the global inancial crisis, a total of 5.7 million new pas-
senger cars were purchased in 2010. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Transportation
Energy Data Book, in 2010 there was nearly one vehicle (0.77) per capita, and nearly two vehicles
(1.79) per household. In 1960, 2.5 percent of American households owned three or more cars; in
2010, that number had mushroomed to 19.5 percent. Data from the International Organization of
Motor Vehicle Manufacturers reports that Japan, the United States, China, and Germany pro-
duced a total of 35,654,551 vehicles in 2008, with Japan in the lead at over 11.5 million units. In
China, where an estimated 1.6 million cars were sold in 2000, car sales are projected to reach 100
million by 2015. As India and other Asian countries experience increasing economic stability, car
ownership is expected to rise on a global scale.
3 Car manufacturing is responsible for one in ten manufacturing jobs, but along with car driv-
ing it is one of the biggest contributors to air pollution and global warming. Car manufacturing
consumes one half of the world’s oil, and for every gallon of gas burned in an automobile engine,
20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) are released into the atmosphere. Up to the 1960s, when the
federal Clean Air Act gave governments in the United States the power to set air quality controls,
cars had no pollution control devices whatsoever. Between 1975 and 2011, the carbon footprint for
cars shrank by 51.5 percent, but the total output of CO 2 continued to grow. In 2008, the U.S. was
responsible for 19.34 percent of global CO 2 emissions, exceeded only by China, which produced
6,801 million metric tons, and in 2010, CO 2 emissions from the U.S. transportation sector was 15