World News for Students of English

06-08-2024 15:00

Have you wondered why US school buses are yellow?

In the past, school transportation had no rules, and children walked or rode horse-drawn wagons to school. Later, some districts instilled patriotism with red, white, and blue buses, but the colors changed with Frank Cyr.

Cyr was a professor at Columbia University, and in 1939, he organized a conference on the school bus. Teachers, transportation experts, engineers, and paint specialists wrote with 42 pages of school bus regulations. They decided to use yellow because black letters were easy to see on a yellow background, and yellow stood out in bad weather. The color is now officially known as national school bus glossy yellow.

Every day in the US, 480,000 school buses drive children to school. The federal law doesn’t require all buses to be yellow; however, safety experts recommend it.

Difficult words: instill (to put an idea or attitude in a person’s mind), patriotism (the feeling that you are proud of your country more than any others), glossy (shiny).

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