How to Summarize

Section 1. Translate the following sentences

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.

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

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.

Follow the steps outlined below to write a summary:

1. Read the original carefully in order to understand it completely and accurately.
2. Group the original writing into related paragraphs or sections.
3. Write a one or two sentence summary for each group of related paragraphs. These sentences should reflect the main idea of each section accurately.
4. Write one sentence which gives the main idea of the entire writing.
5. 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.
6. 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)

Let’s 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).

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