Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free PDF

Zaroug Jaleel of Massachusetts both misidentify the major river of Shaanxi Province as the Yangtze (it’s the Yellow). Then, two rounds later, they both miss questions on archaeological sites, making them the first two finalists to be eliminated. I notice, during this round, that the questions the kids struggle with aren’t always the ones you expect. Shantan Krovvidi of North Carolina earns a strike for not knowing that Salisbury is the closest city to Stonehenge, while Kennen goes out for guessing that the largest city in the West Bank is Jerusalem. (It’s actually Hebron.) These are reasonably well-known bits of cultural literacy, but the kids blank on them, even as they nail much harder questions about the Turkish city of Izmir or the islands of Vanuatu. Their knowledge has come from a firehose blast of atlases and encyclopedias, not a lifetime of travel and media. It isn’t lived in, like ours.
    A Smithsonian curator enters, holding a gorilla skull for the kidsto ignore while they’re asked for the name of the East African chain of volcanoes in which mountain gorillas live. Four boys fail to come up with the name of the Virunga Mountains, including Siva Gangavarapu, who—heartbreakingly—wrote “Virunga Mts” on his card, then crossed it out and began to write “Rwenzori” as time expired. Each time someone walks offstage, the pace of play accelerates, the next round becoming just a little bit shorter. Suddenly, half the seats are empty.
    The next three rounds of questions eliminate one contestant apiece, in the orderly manner of a children’s counting rhyme. (“Ten Little Indian Americans”?) Kenji’s little Auto-Tuned chirp of a voice, so reliable in earlier rounds, is unable to identify Mexicali, Mexico, in his allotted twelve seconds, and then there were four. Ten-year-old Vansh doesn’t know that Clew Bay is in Ireland, and then there were three. Finally, in the tenth round, Shantan is stumped on the name of a Bulgarian port city. After his incorrect guess, he looks to his left: Eric Yang hasn’t missed a single question, but Arjun and Shantan each entered the round with one strike against them. If Arjun misses his question as well, Shantan will get a new lease on life and could still make the finals.
    “Arjun, which South American country has phased out its former currency, the sucre, and adopted the United States dollar as its official currency?”
    Arjun bites his lip. “Ecuador?” he tries.
    “Ecuador is right!” announces Alex. Arjun lowers his head and pumps his fists quietly. Shantan has just won the third-place prize, a $10,000 scholarship, but he still looks awfully unsatisfied as he turns off his mike and rises to walk into the wings. He was so close.
    The two finalists, Eric and Arjun, switch seats for the finals. Alex will stand at a lectern between them on the lower tier as they each use paper cards to write answers to the same questions. Whoever answers more of the five final questions correctly is the champion.
    “The so-called winning question every year is actually a losing question,” explains Anders Knospe, sitting in the audience next to me. Anders signed quite a few autographs in his Bozeman, Montana, middle school after winning the 1994 bee; he’s returned fifteen yearslater to reminisce and say hi to Mary Lee Elden and other bee organizers. He came down on the train from Yale, where he’s finishing up a PhD in physics.
    “Look how calm they are,” I say. Grown men have been known to faint dead away from the stress of competing on Jeopardy!, but these middle schoolers have come through the quiz crucible with flying colors. Eric, on Alex’s left, has stayed perfectly poker-faced—aloof, even—through the entire finals. The cucumber, just like his parents said. Arjun has been more antsy throughout, a little more the awkward adolescent than the other nine finalists, exhaling visibly with relief in the tenth round when he stayed alive with a wild guess of Bogotá,