Hi there! With 'bus', it doesn't really matter whether you use 'the' or 'a'. With 'car' it is nearly always 'the'. The general meaning with 'the' and 'a' is this: When you use 'the bus' you are talking about the means of transport. This means that you are just talking about buses in general instead of trains or boats for example. When you use 'a bus' you are talking about the physical object that is a bus. It means that you an take any one of those physical buses within this means of transport. So to summarize, 'the bus' means this form of transport in general. 'A bus' is a physical object. For example, if you have 3 buses going to your school their numbers are 23, 145, and 150. If you say 'We can take the bus to school' - it just means that we won't use any other transport like the car or train If you say 'We can take a bus to school' - it means we can take any one of the buses 23, 145 or 150. If you say the specific bus number it is always 'the' - We can take the 23 bus to school As you can see, there isn't much difference in the meaning here so it doesn't really matter with most forms of transport. With car, we have the same situation, but you will see that 'the' is the only one we really use: We can take the car to school - we can use this means of transport instead of the bus etc. We can take a car to school - We can take any one of our cars to school (UNLIKELY because even if you have more than one car, it is likely that only one of the cars is possible to take, only the car that is yours) Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions!

Nope, they are trying to describe taking a ride as in "take my father's car to school"(their sample), which, on the contrary, would actually mean you'll be driving your dad's car to school(you borrow it). But I think if you don't do the driving, "take" isn't appropriate. OALED: take 9.to choose, buy or rent. I think 'take a car' belongs to this sense 37. to use a form of transport. "take a bus" goes here.

It's the same only if you're hiring the car. If I'm driving my car I wouldn't say that I'm taking a car. I'm driving my car to school would be correct. Is this the situation that the teachers are trying to describe?

I'm sorry. Maybe I didn't make myself clear. So just tell me, is the "take" in "take a car" different from the "take" in "take a bus"