Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [60]
In a downstairs conference room, one group of eleven competitors is meeting their moderator, National Geographic digital media VP Rob Covey. “Work stops at National Geographic every year for the bee,” Mary Lee Elden told me. “People gather around monitors to watch.” It’s a rewarding moment for the society—one of their only chances to see such an enthusiastic young audience for the maps and magazines and TV shows they spend the rest of the year casting out into the void.
“Your first instruction is to relax, if that’s possible,” Covey says, to uptight parental laughter. The shorter contestants are shown how to lower the microphone stand—there are fourth graders up to eighth graders here, and it’s a two-foot swing in height across the great gulf of puberty in some cases. Covey warns them in advance that “England” will not be accepted as a name for the United Kingdom, nor “Holland” for the Netherlands. Oceania is officially a region, not a continent. (This was apparently a point of controversy and protest at a previous bee.) As the eleven boys take their turns at the mike for a practice round, I slip into a folding chair on the room’s center aisle. Brian McClendon, who is representing National Geographic’s new partner Google at the bee, sits down next to me. He’s the VP of engineering for Google’s Maps and Earth products, which makes him, among this crowd, something of a sex symbol. There were gasps and whispers of “Yeah!” among the kids in the crowd when he was introduced.
“Okay if I sit here?”
“Sure. This is clearly the fifty-yard line of geography bee seating.”
“The Prime Meridian,” he corrects me.
“Which country borders more landlocked countries—Algeria or Democratic Republic of the Congo?” Rob Covey is asking the first contestant, Robert Chu of Connecticut. He has fifteen seconds to answer.
“Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he replies instantly, with utter confidence. He’s correct. My eyebrows shoot up a couple inches. In a heartbeat, he’s managed to visualize the borders of two different African nations, as well as the borders of all their neighbors, and calculate the answer. The Democratic Republic of Congo beats Algeria by three countries.
The geography bee may have originated as a result of all the face-palm-stupid answers that American students were giving on geography surveys, but the questions in the national bee are far from stupid—they are very, very hard. And fourth graders are acing them. Zimbabwean national parks, Dominican volcanoes, Italian car production statistics, Swazi life expectancy—nothing seems beyond their grasp. “At first you think, ‘Oh, that’s cute. I bet I can do as well as that,’” says Ted Farnsworth, the father of Arizona contestant Nicholas Farnsworth. “Then you watch the state finals, and you’re like—” Here he makes the noise of a slide whistle deflating.
The questions can—in fact, have to— be this hard because the kids who make it to nationals are so scrupulously prepared. A few weeks ago I drove out to the exurbs ten miles east of Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, to meet Caitlin Snaring, the impossibly self-possessed high school sophomore who, in 2007, became only the second girl ever to win the bee. But that was Caitlin’s second run at the title; the year before, she’d been ousted in the prelims.
“Do you remember the question that you went out on in your first bee?” I asked, knowing she did.
“ ‘What do you call the line of thunderstorms that precedes a cold front?’” she recited verbatim. (Caitlin says she has a “near-photographic” memory.) I didn’t know the answer either: a squall line.
“It’s not technically a physical geography term,” she grumbled, apparently still stung by the loss. “It’s just something sailors say. But I was really disappointed. I thought that would be my only chance.” After the loss, she cried, briefly, and gave her mom, Traci, a hard time for never having found her a copy of the out-of-print National Geographic Almanac,