Self-study 5 Task Fill in the blanks with an appropriate answer

Task 3. Writing : Write the summary to the given text
Banks of England

The biggest banks of the United Kingdom are the Bank of England, Lloyds' Bank, Midland Bank, Barclays Bank, and the National Westminster Bank.

The Bank of England is the state or national bank, which controls the British banking system. Like any other national bank it issues banknotes and mints coins.

The other four banks are commercial banks. Very often they are called "the Big Four". The National Westminster Bank is often referred to as "NatWest".

Moscow Narodny Bank Ltd. is incorporated as a British registered company. It specializes in the finance of East - West trade. Their close working relationship with banks in East European countries and in the West enables them to provide a unique service in this field.

The first bankers in Britain were Italians who came to do business in the City of London a few centuries ago. They came from Lombardy, a region in Northern Italy where there was a group of independent cities. This group was called the Lombard League.

The Lombards settled down in the part of the City of London which was later called after those Italians, Lombard Street.

The Lombards did not stay in London long. After a century or so they left London because they were made bankrupt. It happened mostly because they loaned money to kings who did not repay the loans.

So the Lombards left, but their name is still alive in London. Lombard Street is still the centre of British banking. This is the street where the head offices of the biggest English and foreign banks are located.

ANSWER:

The Bank of English (BoE) has been used as the basis for many insightful analyses of Modern English, especially by those from the "Birmingham School" of corpus linguists. Because of its composition, many books and article on corpus linguistics suggested that the BoE could be used as a "monitor corpus", to look at recent and ongoing changes in English.

In spite of its high degree of usefulness for purely synchronic studies, we would argue that WordBanks Online (WbO) / the Bank of English (BoE) has certain limitations that seriously limit its usefulness as a monitor corpus. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), on the other hand, was designed from the ground up as a monitor corpus, and it does provide rich, useful data that is not available from WbO/BoE.