# The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Matching information, Matching features, Summary completion

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## The passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the passage below.

**A** Every crop exists in many local varieties, each shaped by generations of selection for a particular soil, climate or taste. When a variety stops being planted, the genes that made it tolerant of drought or resistant to disease may vanish with it. Gene banks prevent such losses by storing seeds in cold, dry conditions. One of the first was founded in 1921, in the city now called St Petersburg, by the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov. During the 28-month siege of the city in the Second World War, the institute's botanists guarded some 120 tonnes of seeds, nuts and roots against bombs, cold and rats, and would not eat them even as they starved. At least 19 of them died, mostly from hunger.

**B** There are about 1,750 gene banks worldwide, but many are far from secure. Collections can be lost through war, floods, fires, power cuts, broken equipment or lack of money; the national gene bank of the Philippines was damaged by a flood and later destroyed by fire. The sensible response is to keep a duplicate of each sample elsewhere. In 1984 the Nordic Gene Bank, now NordGen, placed backup copies of Nordic seeds in a steel container inside an abandoned coal mine near Longyearbyen, on Norway's Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. When planners sought a global backup site, however, a feasibility study in 2004 decided that the mine would not do. The frozen ground there, at about −3.5 °C, was too warm for long-term storage, and the mine was periodically affected by hydrocarbon gases.

**C** The answer was a new vault cut into solid rock on the island of Spitsbergen, roughly halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The Norwegian government committed itself to the project in October 2004 and went on to pay the whole construction bill of about 45 million kroner. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened on 26 February 2008. Its storage area lies more than 100 metres inside a mountain, and the site is about 130 metres above sea level, high enough to stay dry even under worst-case forecasts of rising seas. A cooling system holds the seeds at −18 °C, the international standard for gene banks, while the surrounding permafrost stays at between −3 and −4 °C. If the machinery failed, the frozen mountain would keep the seeds cold for a long time.

**D** The vault has three storage halls, each able to take about 1.5 million seed samples, giving a total capacity of 4.5 million. Each sample is a sealed foil packet containing an average of about 500 seeds, and the vault is designed to hold up to 2.5 billion seeds. By 2026 it held over 1.4 million samples from 134 institutions. Storage is free and works like a safe deposit box: the depositing gene bank keeps ownership, the boxes are never opened, and only the depositor may take its seeds out. Norway owns the building. NordGen runs the vault from day to day and keeps a public online database of what is stored, while the Crop Trust, an international non-profit organisation, contributes to running costs and helps gene banks in developing countries to pack and ship their seeds.

**E** For its first seven years, the vault only took seeds in. The war in Syria changed that. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) had a major gene bank at Tel Hadia, near Aleppo, holding wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas and other crops from the region where farming began. Working through the conflict, its staff kept sending duplicates north until January 2014, by which time 116,476 samples, or 83 per cent of the collection, were safe in the Arctic. Later that year the last staff left Tel Hadia. In September 2015, ICARDA made the first withdrawal in the vault's history, and a second, larger one followed in 2017. The seeds were sown at new ICARDA sites in Lebanon and Morocco, and by 2020 more than 81,000 fresh duplicates had gone back to Svalbard.

**F** Meanwhile, the vault faced a threat from the climate it relied on. At the end of 2016, average temperatures on Spitsbergen were more than 7 °C above normal, and rain fell instead of light snow. Meltwater ran into the start of the 100-metre entrance tunnel and froze there. No water reached the seeds. Even so, Statsbygg, the state agency in charge of the building, found that the permafrost around the tunnel had not established itself as expected. Between 2016 and 2019, Norway removed heat sources from the tunnel, dug drainage ditches on the mountainside, built waterproof walls and installed a more efficient cooling system.

**G** Yet the vault is not a complete answer to the loss of crop diversity. It accepts only so-called orthodox seeds, which survive drying and freezing; the seeds of avocado, mango and cocoa, among others, die in such conditions and must be conserved by other means. Checking that samples can still germinate, and sending fresh ones when they decline, remains each depositor's job. Each packet also contains too few seeds to share with plant breeders, so a lost collection cannot be restored from Svalbard: ICARDA expects its regeneration work to continue until 2030 or later. Finally, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization reports that plant diversity in farmers' fields is still falling, which a frozen backup cannot reverse. Crop diversity, the scientists who described ICARDA's rescue concluded, must be protected both in the field and in storage.

## Questions

### Questions 14-18: Matching information

The passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.

14. examples of crops whose seeds cannot be kept in the vault

15. the greatest number of individual seeds the vault could ever contain

16. reasons why an earlier storage site was judged unsuitable

17. a figure showing how much warmer than usual a period of weather was

18. the proportion of one organisation's collection that had been backed up before it was abandoned

### Questions 19-23: Matching features

Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of organisations below. Match each statement with the correct organisation, A-E. NB You may use any letter more than once.

- **A** the Norwegian government
- **B** the Crop Trust
- **C** NordGen
- **D** ICARDA
- **E** Nikolai Vavilov's institute

19. It maintains a record of the vault's contents that anyone can consult.

20. It covered the cost of building the vault.

21. Some of its staff died rather than consume the material they were protecting.

22. It took back some of the seeds it had stored so that new seed could be grown.

23. It carried out work to stop meltwater entering the facility.

### Questions 24-26: Summary completion

Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Problems and limits
At the end of 2016, unusually warm and wet weather caused meltwater to flow into the vault's **(24)** _____, where it froze before it could reach the seeds. In response, Norway took **(25)** _____ out of the tunnel, dug ditches and added waterproof walls. However, even a well-protected vault can store only **(26)** _____ seeds, the kind that survive drying and freezing, so plants such as mango have to be conserved in other ways.

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