Ian King of Salt Lake County felt almost on top of the world after showing he knows his way around the globe well enough to finish sixth Friday in the first National Geography Bee at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society.
He won a $500 scholarship, met "Jeopardy!" TV show host and bee moderator Alex Trebek (to whom he gave a pen from the Alta ski resort) and came tantalizingly close to winning the $25,000 first place.King, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Churchill Junior High School in Holladay, became one of 10 finalists among 55 state and territory champions during competition in preliminary rounds on Thursday.
It appeared he might have an easy time in the finals Friday when one of the first questions asked him to identify a picture of the world's largest open-pit copper mine - which happens to be the Bingham Canyon mine back home in Salt Lake County.
"That was a gift," he said.
King also easily handled questions that asked him to identify on a map where Thailand and the Tibetan Plateau are.
But King was finally undone by a question about what is causing the deforestation of the Himalayas and flooding in Bangladesh. King said soil erosion, but the answer was the cutting down of trees.
Trebek told King and other contestants, "As I tell contestants on our TV show, on another day and with different material, you could have been a champion."
King said, "The competition was tougher than I thought it would be. A lot of the questions were really technical."
King received an all-expense paid trip to Washington for the competition after becoming the Utah state champion over 100 other contestants in the state bee, selection based on scores on a written test.
King was eliminated just a few rounds before the two last finalists faced off for the championship, won by Jack Staddon of Kansas - who attends a church school with only six students.
In the final face-off, the two contestants were asked five final questions. Staddon had three correct compared to his challenger's two.
The questions included what country is the top producer of cork (Portugal), which Soviet city was that country's busiest port during World War II (Murinsk), what was the percentage of blacks in America in 1980 (11.8 percent), what is the name of the high plains region in Peru (the Altoplano) and name two island countries in the Indian Ocean.
The National Geographic Society decided to sponsor the bee after a Gallup poll showed Americans rank among the bottom third in the world in their knowledge of geography and Americans age 18 to 24 placed dead last in their age group.
Society Senior Vice President Robert L. Breeden said, "We hope the bee will motivate students and their teachers to discover the joy and long-term rewards of learning geography."
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(ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)
This is only a test
Here are examples of questions and answers from the National Geography Bee that did not involve the use of maps or slides.
Q. What is the name of the southernmost region of Argentina and Chile?
A. Tierra del Fuego.
Q. What is the name of the fine, silty sediment deposited by the wind?
A. Loess.
Q. What pesticide threatened U.S. ospreys, eagles and other birds of prey by causing them to lay eggs with thin, fragile shells?
A. DDT.
Q. What are the two official languages of Peru?
A. Spanish and Quechua.
Q. What river flows through Hell's Canyon?
A. The Snake River.
Q. What is the name of rainfall resulting from the vertical rise of moist, warm air until the moisture condenses into raindrops?
A. Convectional rain.