Over the past four hundred years, 450 types of plants and trees around the world
have become extinct as a result of the combined effects of global warming,
population growth, deforestation, flooding and the fact that deserts are advancing
in some regions at a rate of nearly four miles a year. D) Scientists estimate a
quarter of the world’s remaining 270,00o plant species will be under threat of
extinction by 2050.
In 1997, in an attempt to try to prevent the loss of such precious resource,
volunteers all over Britain began collecting seeds from Britain’s 1,400 species of
wild plants, three hundred of which of are already facing extinction. The seeds
collected are now housed in the Millennium Seed Bank, which opened its doors in
2000. G) Run by the Royal Botanical Garden department of famous Kew Gardens
in London, the bank is located in Sussex about thirty-five miles outside the capital.
The bank is expected to become the world’s biggest seed bank and, apart
from preserving almost all the plant life in Britain, it also aims to have saved the
seeds of more than 24,000 species of plant life, almost a tenth of the world’s
flowering plants, in the next twenty years. B) If they are success, the Millennium
seed bank Project will be one of the largest international conservation projects ever
undertaken.
In order to achieve this aim, the Millennium Seed Bank has a team of
scientist who travel to remote corners of the world to find and collect seeds. They
work together with local botanist and also help them to set up their own seed banks
by training local scientists. F) They also spend a great deal of time negotiating with
governments to allow them to collect the seeds and bring them back to Britain for
storage in the Millennium Seed Bank.
When this seeds arrive at the seed bank, they are sorted, separated by
hand from their pods cleaned and dried an then X-rayed to make sure that they
haven’t been damage in any way that might stop them from growing into healthy
plants. Finally, they are placed in ordinary glass jars and stored in three
underground vaults at temperatures of -20°C. Most plants species have seeds that
can be dried, frozen and stored for years and still grow into healthy plants.
However, the seeds of some species cannot be dried, so they cannot be store in
seed banks in the usual way. A) This seeds include many rainforest tree species
and plants that grow underwater
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