World News for Students of English

15-09-2016 15:00

A solar-powered tuk-tuk has completed a 9,978-kilometre journey from India to Britain. This has been a childhood dream of one Indian man to travel to the UK by road, but he was not happy with the pollution levels in India. Tuk-tuks are one of the most polluting vehicles, so he decided to convert an old tuk-tuk and make it emissions free.

He said that this was challenging because the team and he did not know how to convert the tuk-tuk and they did not have good tools to do it. They built the solar-powered tuk-tuk by trial and error. They failed a lot of times, but the team members who helped him believed in the idea. They even failed last year when they drove 1 kilometre and the tuk-tuk broke down, but now thousands of kilometres is not a problem.

The man reached Britain five days later than planned because someone stole his passport. He hopes that his trip raises awareness of electric vehicles as a sustainable mode of transport.

Difficult words: tuk-tuk (a small three-wheeled motorised vehicle), pollution (if there is pollution somewhere, the place is dangerously dirty), emission (what comes out of a car when it drives), trial and error (experimenting and seeing what works best), awareness (a well-informed interest in something), sustainable (not dangerous to the planet).

You can watch the video news lower on this page.