A Personal Air Vehicle

B2 – Upper Intermediate

The future is now. That is, if we go by the timeline set by the iconic sci-fi movie “Back to the Future.” So where are all the flying cars? According to Professor Missy Cummings in this BBC feature, there are only a few hurdles to the development of personal air vehicles. And technology is not one of them.

Watch the video then read the article and be ready to express your thoughts about the topic.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131031-a-flying-car-for-everyone

Discussion Questions:

1. Would owning a personal air vehicle simplify or complicate our lives?
2. What are the hurdles that prevent the full realization of the flying car?
3. If personal air vehicles will essentially be robots, what can be done to ensure that they will be hacker-proof?

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4 replies on “A Personal Air Vehicle”

1. Would owning a personal air vehicle simplify or complicate our lives?
I think it would depend a lot on the situation of the society, if they have created rules and laws that regularize and simplify the circulation with air cars.

What are the hurdles that prevent the full realization of the flying car?
From what is said in the documentary it seems that the main hurdles is the psychological barrier to give control to technology.

3. If personal air vehicles will essentially be robots, what can be done to ensure that they will be hacker-proof?
It seems that robots will be able to withstand cyber-attacks and not be so easy to hack.

Great work keeping consistent in your writing practice!

Here is one sentence you can revise a bit:

From what is said in the documentary it seems that the main hurdles is the psychological barrier to give control to technology.

From what is said in the documentary, it seems that one of the main
hurdles is the psychological aspect to give up cars.

Happy writing!

1. Would owning a personal air vehicle simplify or complicate our lives?
I think it would complicate everything. We would need new regulations, trainings, laws, infraestructure, etc etc. It would mean opening a new world of transportation.

2. What are the hurdles that prevent the full realization of the flying car?
Safety issues mainly, and governments getting on board with it.

3. If personal air vehicles will essentially be robots, what can be done to ensure that they will be hacker-proof?
Make them more manual and human handled, other than that, nothing. Hacking works with AI, it improves almost as much as security does.

Well done answer the questions for this lesson. Keep at it!

Just take a look at how you can slightly improve this answer of yours:

We would need new regulations, trainings, laws, infraestructure, etc etc. It would mean opening a new world of transportation.

We would need new regulations, training, laws, infrastructures, etc etc. It would also mean opening up a whole new world of transportation.

Continue doing this exercise to better your writing skills more and more.

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