Name: English Collocations You Must Know for Towns and Cities!
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 8 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

Well, hello, and welcome to this English lesson about collocations that you can use in a small town or in a big city.

Past simple

Collocations are when two words are very commonly used together.

And I said small town, and I said big city.

You could just say city or town, but sometimes in English we like to use more words, and I don't know why.

I'm going to the big city to see a baseball game next week.

So welcome to this English lesson about collocations that you can use when talking about a town or a city, or a small town or a big city.

Another common collocation that you'll hear when people talk about a town or city is busy street.

In fact, people don't want to live on a busy street.

The street behind me is actually quite busy because it's right by an intersection.

So if I was to move to this town, I wouldn't want to live on a busy street.

I wouldn't want to live on a street where there's lots of trucks and loud cars and noises and an intersection and all of those things happening.

I wouldn't want to live on a busy street, but I would want to live on a quiet street.

A quiet street is a street where there is very little traffic, or no traffic.

I'm actually standing in the middle of the street as I record this part of the English lesson.

If you want to live in a nice part of town, you usually look for a quiet street to live on so you can sleep at night and there's no big trucks going by and those kinds of things.

In fact, in this area it says there's no exit there, so you actually can't go down that road unless you live there.

And over here there's actually a sign that says no trucks.

So, I guess if you're running a business, you probably want to be on a busy street so you have lots of customers.

But if you want to sleep peacefully at night and not hear the sound of traffic or the sound of trucks, you'll want to live on a quiet street.

I guess this isn't as quiet a street as I thought it was and I guess sometimes big trucks do go by.

But in general, I think this is a great place to live.

I'm sure that truck was just lost and didn't know where he was going.

Did you ever play the game SimCity on the computer?

When you play the game SimCity, you decide what areas your city is going to have.

I'm currently in what I would call the commercial area of this town.

The commercial area in a town is the area where you will find stores and shops and other things like banks and post offices and those kinds of things.

You can see there is a pizza place, a dental clinic, a restaurant.

We are definitely in the commercial area.

A residential area is a place where you'll find houses or apartment buildings.

In North America it's quite common for towns and cities to have people live in different areas from where there are stores or factories.

In this town, this residential area, is actually completely separate from the commercial area I was just in.

In fact, we would call this a subdivision.

There's a bonus English vocabulary word for you.

So a residential area, it's the place in a town or city where you'll find houses or apartment buildings. It's where people live.

Oh, and here's a bonus collocation for you.

When you have a small town, it's very likely that everyone knows each other, especially if it's a really, really small town.

And then you would say it's a close-knit community.

It means that you know the names of all your neighbours.

You know where your neighbour's parents live.

You know that your cousin is married to your neighbour's cousin, or whatever.

There's not a lot of people, so you all know each other very well.

This town is actually quite small, and I would say it's definitely a close-knit community.

The third collocation that I wanted to teach you that we use to talk about different areas in a town or city is industrial area.

This is the industrial area of this town.

In an industrial area you will find factories, or what we call manufacturing plants.

You definitely don't want to live in an industrial area.

It's usually loud and noisy, and there might be funny smells coming from it, and they might work 24 hours a day.

But an industrial area, a place where you will find factories or manufacturing plants, a place where they make things.

You'll see that there are a lot of cars parked behind me because this is a parking lot, another common collocation that you can use when talking about a town.

The cars are all parked in a parking space, or a parking spot.

So when you come to town, you might want to go into a store, and you need a place to park your car.

So you will park it in a parking lot, in a parking space, or in a parking spot.

And this is kind of the opposite of a green space.

Now I have to apologize, this green space isn't actually very green.

It hasn't rained here very much lately, so it's, the grass is looking a little sad, we would say in English.

A green space is a place in a town or city where there is grass, where there's trees, where there might be things like a little bandstand where you can hear a band.

There might be a playground, there might be soccer fields, or what some of you call football fields.

A green space is definitely the opposite of a parking lot.

It's a place where you can just be close to nature, and just relax and enjoy yourself.

Behind me you can see the old train station in this town.

There are actually two collocations we would use to describe an old building like this if you have one in a town or city.

We would call it either a historic building or a historical building.

I'm not sure why we have two terms and they're pretty much interchangeable in my opinion.

A historic building or a historical building is a really old building that we've decided to keep because we like it.

This building is one of the oldest buildings in the town, and even though it's a train station, it's not actually used for that purpose anymore.

The train doesn't stop in this town to pick up passengers anymore.

But behind me you'll see one of the oldest buildings in this town, a historic building or a historical building.

A community centre is a large building where you can do things with people from your town or city.

This is actually a spot where I can teach two collocations because that is a public library, another collocation, and that is the community centre.

Our community centre also has an ice rink attached to it and a gymnasium.

You can rent rooms there if you want to meet with people.

It's just a really cool place where you can come if you want to get together with people from your town or city.

Well, thank you so much for watching this English lesson, where I hope you learned some English collocations you can use when talking about a town or city.

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