第7問 (配点 16)
You are in a student group preparing for an international environmental
presentation contest. You are using the following passage to create
part of the presentation on valuable resources.
bulani arbe
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If you ask someone what the most precious natural resource on Earth is,
they will possibly reply "water," as we cannot survive without it. Or perhaps
"oil," which drives our modern lives, literally, with transportation and
manufacturing depending on it. But what about seeds?
Under a freezing mountain is a building, opened in 2008, that holds the
future of our species. Surprisingly, and scarily, 95% of our food comes from
only 30 crops. The Global Seed Vault holds over 930,000 types of food in the
form of millions of tiny brown frozen dots. It could be described as part bank
and part museum, storing a collection of 13,000 years of our crop-growing
history. Set up by Norway, with government money assigned to run it, it sits
in a sea of ice, which is the most northern place that regular planes can fly to.
Around 1,700 similar projects, called gene banks, are scattered around the
globe. These mostly store seeds from the local regions, which are mainly
collected to catalogue scientific information about different plants and to save
species in danger of dying out. Some, especially those such as bananas and
coffee plants from hotter nations, do not have seeds that are possible to store,
and the plants themselves are preserved in chemicals. As technology allowing
such practices develops, and alarm about climate change escalates, more focus
is on this work in the hope of being able to form new varieties of crops that
can survive harsh climates. Between 2005 and 2008 the price of wheat rose
dramatically, and the cost of rice tripled, mainly due to weather and plant
diseases wiping out large proportions of global crops. With help by the United
Nations in writing a document called the International Seed Treaty in 2001, the
goal of the Global Seed Vault is to obtain and retain copies of every seed in
smil dguol ai glad 101 grudas moi mis
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