单选题 The first time I tried shark-fin soup was at Time Warner"s annual dinner in Hong Kong. Shark-fin soup is a luxury item ($100 bowl in some restaurants)in Hong Kong and Mainland China, its biggest consumers; it"s a dish that embodies east Asia"s intertwined notions of hospitality and keeping (or losing) "face". "It"s like champagne", says Alvin Leung, owner of Bo Innovation, a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong. "You don"t open a bottle of Coke to celebrate. It"s a ritual . "
Unfortunately, this gesture of hospitality comes with a price tag much bigger than that $ 100 bowl. All told, up to 70 million sharks are killed annually for the trade, despite the fact that 30% of shark species are threatened with extinction . "Sharks have made it through multiple mass extinctions on our planet, " says Matt Rand, director of Pew"s Global Shark Conservation division. "Now many species are going to go the way of the dinosaur—for a bowl of soup. "
The shark-fin industry has gained notoriety in recent years not just because of what it"s doing to the global shark population but also because of what"s known as finning—the practice of catching a shark, removing its fins and dumping the animal back into the sea. While a pound of shark fin can go for up to $ 300, most shark meat isn"t particularly valuable, and it takes up freezer space and weight on fishing boats. Today, finning is illegal in the waters of the E. U. , the U. S. and Australia, among others; boats are required to carry a certain ratio of fins to carcasses (尸体) to prevent massive overfishing. But there are loopholes in antifinning laws that are easy to exploit. In the E. U. , for example, ships can land the fins separately from the carcasses, making the job of monitoring the weight ratio nearly impossible. In the U. S. , a boat found carrying nearly 65, 000 lb. ( 30, 000 kg) of illegal shark fins won a court case because it was registered as a cargo vessel, which current U. S. finning. laws do not cover.
Sharks populations can"t withstand commercial fishing the way more fertile marine species can. Unlike other fish harvested from the wild, sharks grow slowly. They don"t reach sexual maturity until later in life—the female great white, for example, at 12 to 14 years—and when they do, they have comparatively few offspring at a time, unlike, tunas , which release millions of eggs when they spawn.
The shark"s plight is starting to be weighed against the delicacy"s cultural value. The conservation group has lobbied local restaurants that offer the classic nine-course banquet served at Cantonese weddings, of which shark fin is traditionally a part, to offer a no-shark menu as a choice to couples.
After my first encounter with shark-fin soup, I decided that, like my colleagues, I would probably skip it next time. Unfortunately, that next time came at an intimate dinner in a small, private dining room, where I was both a guest and a stranger. When the soup—the centerpiece of the meal—was set down before me, I ate it. Apparently, I"m not the only one to cave . "You go to a wedding, and you refused to eat it just because you feel you"re insulted— I"m not that extreme, " Leung, the chef, says. "If other people believe that it brings luck .or brings face, I"d be a spoilsport . "To make a dent in the slaughter of the sharks, however, there are going to have to be a lot of people willing to spoil this particular sport.

单选题 Which of the following statements about shark-fin soup is true?

单选题 Some fishmen land the fins separately from the carcasses in order to ______.

单选题 It can be inferred from the passage that ______.

单选题 It is implied in this passage that to protect shark from extinction, the most important thing to do is ______.

单选题 The best title for this passage is ______.