motopokep

There was a time many moons ago when I was into tuning bikes. I watched a few videos, then fine-tuned 4 bikes in my family, 3 of them being 21-speed hybrids, and then a neighbor saw me doing it and asked me to tune his bike. I can't identify sprocket sizes by numbers, but I understand how gears work. The reason for my question here was that I'm not an experienced bike buyer, having bought only 3 multi-speed bikes at big chain stores, all with 21 speeds. Now, I saw a same model bike online with 14, 16, and 18 speeds, and simply wondered if that means that the difference between a 14 and an 18 is that there are fewer middle gears on the back cassette, or the difference is that the 18 speed has 2 more smaller gears, resulting in higher top speed. Before coming here, I reached out to the seller and even manufacturer, but neither has responded so far. My guess would be that there are less middle gears, giving less options for riding uphill, but I could be wrong, as I never bought a road bike. So in reality, my question was not about how gears affect speed, but which gears manufacturers typically skip on in same model bike with less speeds. I tried going to a local reputable bike store to explore bikes, but they're not very friendly, they have this "block post" at the door, a retractable line that doesn't let you cross, a temperature check, a name sign in sheet, an empty store, and staff that wants to get you out of there as quickly as possible, cuz the store is virtually empty and you're not gonna buy anything, they are just there to service customer's bikes nowadays. I spend under a minute there, it was clear they wanted me to leave as they had no inventory. That's why I came on here.