Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Two decades ago, the channels that separate the Adriatic Islands were brimming with giant blue-fin tuna, a species so plentiful that tourists used to climb ladders by the sea to watch the schools swim by.
     Today, these majestic predators are rarely, if ever, caught. The catches have dropped by 80 percent over the past few years, even for high-tech trawlers that now comb remote corners of the sea in search of the hard-to-find fish.
     “This is past the alarm stage,” said Simon Cripps, director of the global marine program at the World Wildlife Fund. “We are seeing a complete collapse of the tuna population. It could disappear and never come back.” The group is urging the European Union to impose an immediate fishing moratorium until the international body that regulates tuna catches meets in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in November.
     Many edible fish stocks in the Mediterranean and its extension, the Adriatic, have sharply declined in the past decade because of pollution and intensive fishing, including crayfish and John Dory, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Croatia, much of the fish eaten at seaside resorts is imported from as far away as the United States.
     But it is the blue-fin tuna that is in crisis, thanks to a new and lucrative European network of fishing and fish farming companies that provide the prized fish to sushi and sashimi markets in Japan. With tuna prices going as high as $15 a pound in Tokyo, European trawlers fish for tuna aggressively and illegally, far exceeding international quotas meant to protect the species, scientists said. Compounding the problem is the recent development of tuna fattening farms in Croatia, Spain, Turkey and other Mediterranean countries.
     Now, even small juvenile tuna, captured in the few corners of the Mediterranean where the species still breeds or even from the Atlantic, can be brought to the vast underwater cages that line the Croatian coast, where they are fed for months or years until they are ready for market. And so, though few tuna are in Croatia’s seas and none are in its restaurants, tuna is one of this country’s most lucrative food exports. One hundred percent of Croatia’s tuna is farm-fattened, ending up as toro—precious, fatty raw tuna.