Example of the task fulfilled with the use of British National Corpus

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	Nuclear 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

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