Pertanyaan

This passage is for the following question. Flocks of chattering African grey parrots, more than a thousand flashes of red and white on grey at a time, were a common sight in the deep forests of Ghana in the 1990s. But a 2016 study published in the journal Ibis reveals that these birds, in high demand around the world as pets, and once abundant in forests all over West and central Africa, have almost disappeared from Ghana. According to the study, the pet trade and forest loss—particularly the felling of large trees where the parrots breed—are major factors contributing to the decline. Uncannily good at mimicking human speech, the African grey (and the similar but lesser-known Timneh parrot) is a prized companion in homes around the world. Research has shown that greys can be as smart as a five-year-old human child, capable of developing a limited vocabulary and even forming simple sentences. The grey parrot has a wide historic range across West and central Africa—1.1 million square miles (nearly three million square kilometers)—from Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana in West Africa, through Nigeria and Cameroon and the Congo forests, to Uganda and western Kenya. Ghana accounts for more than 30,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers) of that range, but losses of greys there have been some of the most devastating. These African grey parrots were rescued from smugglers and released on Ngamba Island in Lake Victoria. The African grey parrot is the single most heavily traded wild bird. “The grey parrot populations in Ghana have declined catastrophically, and the species is now very rare across the country,” said Nigel Collar, of BirdLife International, a global partnership dedicated to conserving birds and their habitats. Collar was one of the authors of the paper, which notes that since 1992 Ghana has lost 90 to 99 percent of its African greys. “Dedicated searching, including visits to roosts, which had as many as 1,200 individuals 20 years ago, yielded just a handful of grey parrot sightings,” said Nathaniel Annorbah, a Ghanaian graduate student at Manchester Metropolitan University, in England, who was the study’s lead author. The sentence “Uncannily good at mimicking human speech, the African Grey is a prized companion in homes around the world,” in paragraph 2 can be best restated as ... (SBMPTN – 2016)