Think instead about gears on a bicycle. You set off and start pedalling. After a certain speed it seems like most of the effort is going into spinning your legs really fast, rather than driving the bike forwards. In other words you legs have a maximum efficient RPM. So you change gear and now your legs are spinning at a reasonable rate and you can accelerate a bit more. The gears aren’t magical though: above a certain speed it’s simply too hard work to push the pedal each time so you can’t maintain that speed even in the optimal gear.
You might ask why you don’t just start in a high gear. Well have you tried it? When you set off you have to push very hard on the pedal and even then you only accelerate very slowly. In other words your legs can only deliver so much torque.
Well a car engine is quite like your legs: it can only deliver so much torque, and it can only go up to so much RPM. So you use gears to keep the engine in the best range of RPM while the speed of the car changes.
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