By Pranav Kaundinya
Each year, John Glenn Middle School students participate in the National Geography Bee. Each social studies class has a verbal Geo Bee, and the winner of each class moves on to the school-wide Geography Bee.
The one winner from the school bee takes an online quiz, and the top 100 scoring kids move on to the Massachusetts state geography bee. The winner of that goes to the National Geography Bee, which is sponsored by the National Geography Society and held in Washington DC. Many other schools take part in this geography bee. Every year, there are 2.6 million American children who participate in this geography bee.
All kids, grades 6-8, take part in this bee, and all three grades have the same questions- so the 8th graders have an age advantage over the younger kids. The classroom geo bee consists of 7 rounds- During one round, each student is asked one question. Since there are 7 rounds, each student is asked a total of 7 questions.
The rounds usually have a theme, like “Odd One Out” or “US Geography”. The students are asked the question, then given 2 choices. Students must choose the correct answer out of the two choices.
On the last round out of the 7 rounds, however, there are no choices given, and the answer is always one out of the 195 countries in the world. One example of a question used in the school geography bee is: “Ostrich eggs are sometimes used to hold water in the Kalahari Desert. The Kalahari desert is in which continent: Australia or Africa?”(answer is Africa).
The questions start off simple but become harder toward the end of the contest. Each level, the questions become more difficult.
The winning question for the JGMS school geography bee was: “a densely populated region is located between the cities of Provo and Ogden in which state?” (Utah).
Seventh-grader Eli Bak was the only JGMS student who got the right answer. He has already taken the online test and will be getting the results back on March 2. We hope he makes it to the state finals!
Editor’s Note: Pranav Kaundinya is a student at Bedford’s John Glenn Middle School
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