Craig Dodge - Blog

"Rack up" is an English phrasal verb, which means to accumulate or acquire a lot of something. For example:

If you join an airline's frequent flier program and fly that airline a lot, you can rack up a lot of miles in their program.

If you borrow a lot of money, you can rack up a huge debt.

If you often drive too fast, you can rack up a lot of speeding tickets.

As mentioned before, I recently discovered the GPS function on my HTC Desire HD. I downloaded Google's My Tracks app and started recording my bike rides. My Tracks can easily upload the data into a spreadsheet in Google Docs, but I also recently discovered a website called Endomondo where I can also upload the information and it gives a very nice picture of the routes. Even more interesting is that the Endomondo site also tells users how many rides, miles (kilometers), hours and burned calories they've racked up. You can see my Endomondo profile HERE, and you can see my riding summary on the right side of this blog. At the time of writing this post, I'd racked up 904km since I started keeping track in May. It's very motiviting!!

Maybe you can use this kind of motivation in your English learning! Start racking up books read, or podcasts listened to, or vocabulary words learned, or class hours studied. Keep track of them, and as the list grows, your English ability will also improve.