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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63079 Medium Pacific salmon: life cycle and BC fisheries

Read the following passage.

A. A Pacific salmon's life begins in the gravel of a stream or lake bed, in a nest called a redd that the female has prepared. She lays thousands of eggs, usually between 2,000 and 10,000, but fewer than one per cent survive to produce the next generation. A newly hatched fish, called an alevin, stays hidden in the gravel and feeds on its yolk sac. It then becomes a fry and hides from predators in dark pools. Before it can move from fresh water to salt water, the young fish goes through a change called smolting and gains a silvery coating over its scales.

B. Salmon enter the ocean as young fish and gain more than 99 per cent of their adult weight there. Five species live in North American waters: chinook, coho, chum, sockeye and pink. Pink salmon have a fixed two-year lifespan, while chinook, the largest species, return to spawn at ages from two to seven. When they mature, salmon travel back to the stream where they were born, and scientists believe they find it by its chemical scent. Once back in fresh water they stop eating, yet they often travel 50 kilometres a day on the way to their spawning grounds. Most adults die within days of spawning.

C. Salmon have long been central to First Nations on the Pacific coast. Many permanent villages stood beside the main salmon rivers, and salmon mattered for culture, trade and food. In 1992 the federal fisheries department began the Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy after a Supreme Court ruling affirmed the right of First Nations to fish for food, social and ceremonial purposes, and today those fisheries have priority over all others. Commercial fishing began soon after Europeans arrived, and fleets now use seine nets, gillnets and trolling lines; seiners take about half of the catch.

D. Salmon now face serious pressures. Climate change, habitat loss and fishing pressures have affected them at every stage of life, and in dry summers some streams dry up, leaving young fish trapped in isolated pools. In Vancouver, only two of about 50 salmon streams remain. Under the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and its partners have restored 15.7 million square metres of habitat and retired more than 575 commercial salmon licences, cutting the number of eligible licences by over 43 per cent. The initiative also funds more than 100 hatcheries run by partner groups.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Under one salmon program, the number of permits for catching salmon to sell has been cut.

- 2.
It normally takes just a few weeks for salmon eggs to open.

- 3.
Very few of a salmon's eggs survive long enough to produce young of their own.

- 4.
Adult salmon go without food after they come back from the sea.

- 5.
Young salmon undergo a physical change before heading out to sea.

- 6.
A court decision confirmed that First Nations may catch fish for food.

- 7.
One species always lives exactly two years.

- 8.
Fishing for sale on the coast grew quickly because tinned salmon was popular in Europe.

- 9.
Scientists think salmon recognise their home streams by smell.

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