Sorry, Kids. Fire Stations Are Ditching Fire Poles

Dec 31, 2010 English 1st Paragraph

If it’s been a few years since your last school field trip to the local fire station, brace yourself for disappointment — because you’ll be hard-pressed to find the signature apparatus you remember: the fire pole…

Read this on Time.

• A fire station is a building where fire engines (fire trucks) are kept and where firefighters work and are ready to go and put out fires in people’s homes etc.
• If you ditch something, you no longer want it so you decide not to use it anymore.
• A field trip is a visit by students (accompanied by their teachers) to study something away from their school, for example a field trip to a factory, a hospital, a farm, etc.
• Brace yourself: Be ready for (something unpleasant)
• You’ll be hard-pressed to find…: It will be difficult for you to find…
• When you write a letter, you put your signature (usually your name which is written in a special and fixed way) at the end of the letter. When people see your signature, they will be sure that you are the person who has written the letter. Some things are like a signature, because when you see them, you can be sure and can identify a person, place etc, for example a writer may have a signature style of describing people, for example he always starts by describing his/her character’s hair, so when you see that, you can be sure who the writer is. In this text, the signature apparatus means a typical tool which can show you that you are really in a fire station.