Indian Americans have won the last four championships.
AB Wire
Seven out of the 10 finalists in the National Geographic Bee this year are of Indian American-origin, with a chance to take the winning championship streak to five consecutive years.
The winners of the Geographic Bee title in the last four years have been Indian-American students: Rahul Nagvekar in 2012, Sathwik Karnik in 2013, Akhil Rekulapelli in 2014, and Karan Menon in 2015.
This year, the top 10 contestants – from the age group of 10 to 14 – from the field of 54 state-level champions who took part in the preliminaries will compete in the final round to be held at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, May 25. The finalists comprise of 9 boys and one girl.
The winner of the 28th annual National Geographic Bee title will get a $50,000 college scholarship and a lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society. The champion will also travel (along with one parent or guardian), on an all-expenses paid trip on a Lindblad expedition to southeast Alaska aboard National Geographic Sea Lion, including a stop at Glacier Bay National Park, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. The champion also gets lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society.
The second and third place winners will receive $25,000 and $10,000 college scholarships, respectively.
The 10 finalists are:
- Kapil Nathan — Alabama
- Rishi Nair — Florida
- Rishi Kumar — Maryland
- Saketh Jonnalagadda — Massachusetts
- Lucas Eggers — Minnesota
- Grace Rembert — Montana
- Samanyu Dixit — North Carolina
- Ashwin Sivakumar — Oregon
- Pranay Varada — Texas
- Thomas Wright — Wisconsin.
The tie-breaker questions this year to determine the finalists were: The Paraguay River flows into which other river near the city of Corrientes? (Parana River); Corno Grande is the highest peak in which mountain range that stretched the length of peninsular Italy? (Apennines); The islands of Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer belong to which country? (Ireland).
The contestants usually have an encyclopedic memory, but sometimes it’s the mundane type questions that could throw them off-track.
The Denver Post reported that this year’s top 10 finalist, Kapil Nathan, a 6th grader from Hoover, Alabama, was eliminated from the competition last year when he couldn’t get an answer to a geographical question focused on the US: the largest port city in Georgia (Savannah).
“We went to Savannah during Christmas. We went up the East Coast and all the way up to Montreal,” Kapil said. “I’ve learned a lot about the United States in the past year.”
The finals, which will be taped for broadcast on National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo WILD, on Friday, have a game show-type format, with pre-taped segments, quirky scoring and questions that are sometimes subjective. The winner can be hard to predict, and unlike the National Spelling Bee — which will also be contested this week — repeat finalists have been rare.
But the kids are similar — dedicated and ambitious, aspiring surgeons and scientists — and they set other extracurricular activities aside in order to expand their knowledge of maps and borders, nations, cities, cultures and history. Also like the spelling bee, the winners in recent years have been predominantly Indian-American, and the competition has become a point of pride for that community, reported the Denver Post.
Humorist, author and “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent Mo Rocca takes over as host of the finals this year. Alex Trebek was the host for 25 years before stepping down after the 2013 bee.
Kapil normally studies two to three hours a day, and he took the week before the bee off from school to focus on his preparation, the report said.
The Dallas Morning News reported Pranay Varada, who lives in Irving and won the Texas State Bee on April 1, is a seventh-grade student at DeWitt Perry Middle School in Carrollton. When he won the state bee, the soft-spoken student said he would keep reading Wikipedia and studying atlases to prepare for the championship. So far, that work has paid off.