Geography bee champ follows contest map, discovers gold
By LORA ANDREWS
Student Correspondent
Imagine the clock is ticking and you have 15 seconds to answer any one of these questions. And there's not much pressure, just a championship on the line.
Q: Lake George, of glacial origin, is a large lake located north of the city of Troy near the border of Vermont and which state?
Q: The Apostle Islands, composed of more than 20 heavily forested islands, are in Lake Superior off the northern coastline of which state?
Q: Grand Coulee Dam, one of the largest concrete structures in the world, is a hydroelectric dam located on the Columbia River in which state?
If you were stumped by these puzzlers, take your seat and yield the floor to the 11- to 14-year-old geography students who knew the answers at the annual Hillsboro Middle School Geography Bee, held Friday in the school auditorium.(The answers are New York, Wisconsin, and Washington, respectively).
Becky Faber, daughter of Dave and Connie Faber, claimed geography bee victory in the fourth round of competition, answering one more question than second-place finisher Nicholas Ediger in the championship round. There was a four-way tie for third place, but sixth-grader Bailey Kaufman earned that spot after answering the tie-breaker question.
The field included 10 students from sixth through eighth grade, who had reached the stage by winning their homeroom competition.
U.S. National Parks was the theme for this year's geography bee. The contestants sat up on stage, on folding chairs, and in front of them were folding tables. Behind them was a perfect geography bee backdrop, a forest of evergreens, used last fall for the high school production of "Shenandoah."
As the contestants looked down from their vantage point, they could see a row of contest judges sitting on the front row of the auditorium. And behind the judges, they saw the entire student body of Hillsboro Middle School.
"I was nervous when it started," said Faber, an eighth grader competing in her first geography bee final.
The contestants wrote their answers on scraps of paper and held them up at the same time. By the time the final round began, Faber and Ediger were seated on stage and surrounded by eight empty chairs.
The final round began with map recognition. Each student was allowed to study their copy of the map briefly, and then asked to turn it over. When it was his or her turn, they were allowed to use the map once again to answer the question.
It was Faber and Ediger, in a best out of three. They wrote their answers on pieces of paper and then showed them to the judges at the same time. Unable to come up with an answer to the decisive question, Ediger found humor in the moment. When he held up his answer sheet, it read, "Becky just won!"
In addition to winning a gold medal to wear around her neck, Faber earned the privilege of taking yet another test, a statewide qualifier, to see if she can earn the right to embark on a rare expedition to the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the state geography bee, to be held March 31 at Fort Hays State University.
"If I do well [on the test], I go on to state, but I don't have to," Faber said.
