The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. It was compiled as a general corpus (collection of texts) in the field of corpus linguistics. The corpus covers British English of the late twentieth century from a wide variety of genres with the intention that it will be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.
The BNC Simple Search is a quick and simple way to search the full BNC for a word or a phrase. The result of a search is displayed as a list of up to 50 randomly selected instances headed by a note of the total frequency of the search string. A new search for the same string will generate a different set of randomly selected examples. The source of each example can be checked by clicking on the text code preceding each line.
Section 1. Translate the following sentences
1. It crosses two mountain ranges, 561 rivers, 124 km of permafrost and more than 1000 km of West Siberian bog and marsh on its journey through five time zones to Western Europe.
2. It was, for example, quite common in the last century for ivory objects to be carved from mammoth tusk that had been preserved in the permafrost of the Siberian tundra since the last Ice Age!
3. The region is characterized by permafrost, and smectite and kaolinite are the common authigenic clay minerals in the soils.
4. The co-discoverers, fossil hunters John D. Hansom and Roderick Luckey, were inspired to explore the Kilimanjaro glacier by the success of Russian palaeontologists in retrieving whole frozen mammoths from the Siberian permafrost.
5. Local thicknesses and effects of permafrost are discussed by Tedrow and Brown (1967) for the North American high arctic tundra, Chernov (1985) for the Siberian Arctic, and by papers in Campbell (1966) for Antarctica.
6. The spruce, fir, pine, larch, oak and birch trees cut down will taken centuries to replace because growth is slow on the permafrost.
Section 2. Prepare the BNC Concordance of the word PERMAFROST
| Left context | Key word | Right context | |
| 1. | miles of the bleak, barren | permafrost, | where blindness eventually came |
| 2. | evaporate deposits or | permafrost | structures are not known |
| 3. | Fulton lay on the | permafrost, | miming a cerebral haemorrhage. |
| 4. | discontinuous or patchy | permafrost | underlies much of the Subarctic |
| 5. | Human influence upon | permafrost | and upon endogenetic processes. |
Appendix10. Guidelines for synopses and annotations
How to Summarize
A summary is a shorter version of a longer piece of writing. The summary captures all the most important parts of the original, but expresses them in a shorter space. Summarizing involves putting the main ideas into your own words, including only the main points. Summaries are significantly shorter than the original and take a broad overview of the source material.
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Follow the steps outlined below to write a summary:
- Read the original carefully in order to understand it completely and accurately.
- Group the original writing into related paragraphs or sections.
- Write a one or two sentence summary for each group of related paragraphs. These sentences should reflect the main idea of each section accurately.
- Write one sentence which gives the main idea of the entire writing.
- Start with a summary introduction, which includes the name of the article or book, the author and if appropriate the date and name of the journal, magazine or newspaper in which the article appeared. Include in your summary introduction your statement of the overall thesis of the original. Follow this with the sentence you wrote for each group of related paragraphs, keeping them in the order of the original.
- In your final draft, eliminate repetitions and generally make your summary coherent.
When summarizing, follow the guidelines listed below:
* Include only the main points of the original passage
* Do not worry about following the original order of ideas.
* Keep the length down to no more than half the length of the original.
Here is an example of summarizing provided by Summer Leibensperger (the Academic Center, the University of Houston-Victoria,
http://www.uhv.edu/ac/research/write/):
Original Passage:
Height connotes status in many parts of the world. Executive offices are usually on the top floors; the underlings work below. Even being tall can help a person succeed. Studies have shown that employers are more willing to hire men over 6 feet tall than shorter men with the same credentials. Studies of real-world executives and graduates have shown that taller men make more money. In one study, every extra inch of height brought in an extra $1,300 a year. But being too big can be a disadvantage. A tall, brawny football player complained that people found him intimidating off the field and assumed he "had the brains of a Twinkie." (Locker, K.O. (2003). Business and administrative communication, p. 301)
Lets first identify the main points in the original passage.
Topic sentence: Height connotes status in many parts of the world.
Main point: Even being tall can help a person succeed.
Main point: Executive offices are usually on the top
Main point: being too big can be a disadvantage
Summary:
Though height may connote slowness to some people, in the business world, it is almost universally associated with success. For example, taller men are more likely to be hired and to have greater salaries. Further, those in top positions within a company are more likely to work on the top floors of office buildings (Locker, 2003).
How to Write Annotations
An annotation is a summary made of information in a book, document, online record, video, software code or other information. Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument. Creating these comments, usually a few sentences long, establishes a summary for and expresses the relevance of each source prior to writing.
As you read, section by section, chapter by chapter, consider doing the following, if useful or necessary:
* At the end of each chapter or section, briefly summarize the material.
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* Title each chapter or section as soon as you finish it, especially if the text does not provide headings for chapters or sections.
* Make a list of vocabulary words on a back page or the inside back cover. Possible ideas for lists include the author's special jargon and new, unknown, or otherwise interesting words. Annotating requires you to think critically about a text.
How to Write an Abstract
The purpose of an abstract is to serve as a link between the title of a scientific article (research study) which may be only a few words long and the full article which may be 8-10 or more pages long. The abstract is a useful summary of the article that provides justification for the research. The abstract allows the reader to conclude whether the full article is worth reading.
The abstract should outline the objectives of the research study and its rationale. The materials and methods of the study should be stated with the statistical methods used. The results of the research should be concisely stated. A brief interpretation with the supporting statistics should be provided and a conclusion briefly stated.
There are two main types of abstracts: informative and descriptive ones.
An informative abstract summarizes the entire paper, including the key themes and purpose of the paper, major facts bearing on the conclusion, and a summary of key findings. This is the most common type of abstract.
A descriptive abstract, on the other hand, concentrates on identifying the purpose of the paper, and describing the major areas to be covered in the report. It would be appropriate, for instance, in a review paper reporting on a survey of literature in a particular field.
Task: look through the rules of summarizing, annotating and abstracting given above and prepare informative and descriptive summaries (1200 and 300 symbols accordingly) of the texts on interdisciplinary issues. Prepare informative and descriptive annotations as well.
Sample of outline
Outline is the main idea of the article under consideration, which is accompanied by a list of short paraphrases describing all of its most important details. Outline is a preliminary stage of writing a summary (100-150 words or 500-600 characters) of an article. You can see a graphic organizer below:
Examples of paraphrasing
1. Original sentence:
The inspiration and model for the paints structure comes from nature: the scales of fast-swimming sharks have evolved in a manner that significantly diminishes drag, or their resistance to the flow of currents.
Paraphrased sentence:
The structure of the innovative paint has natural basis and it includes scales of sharks for reduction of drag.
2. Original sentence:
The unique challenge was to apply the fluid paint evenly in a thin layer on the stencil, and at the same time ensure that it can again be detached from the base even after UV radiation, which is required for hardening.
Paraphrased sentence:
The difficulty was to use the fluid paint and be sure that it can be separated from the base even after UV radiation.
Outline
Main idea
In the article Prizewinning nanoparticle based sharkskin for airplanes, ships and wind energy plants by NANO Magazine, 2010, Issue 18, the author writes about the necessity of reduction of flow resistance for making lower fuel consumption.
Important details (paraphrased from the corresponding sentences from the text)
- An innovative paint system lowers the fuel consumption of airplanes and ships as well as costs and CO2 emissions.
- This system with a natural structure based on skarkskins and it is used to reduce aerodynamic drag.
- The team of producers of this innovative system was awarded with the 2010 Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize.
- The innovative paint system contains nanoparticles for stability of paint against UV radiation, temperature change, and mechanical loads.
- The next step was show how to use the new system.
- The new innovative system saves 4.48 million tons of fuel for airplanes and 2,000 tons of fuel for a large container ship every year.
- A new paint can help to energy gain.
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Summary
Yvonne Wilke, Dr. Volkmar Stenzel and Manfred Peschka of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM in Bremen developed a new paint system for reduction of aerodynamic drag. The paint has a natural structure and contains nanoparticles creating its stability against UV radiation, temperature change, and mechanical loads. This new paint helps to save annually up to 4.48 million tons of fuel for airplanes and 2,000 tons of fuel for a large container ship every year. The use of this new prize-winning (2010 Joseph von Fraunhofer) paint system is described.
, IFAM . , , . 4480 2.000 . , (2010).
