Geography Bowls are held at various regional division meetings in the US and Canada throughout the fall, and regional teams are formed out of those competitions. Regional teams then compete in a round-robin format at the AAG Annual Meeting. The two teams with the best overall scores at the end of the question-answer sessions are then matched against each other in the final round. This years’ championship was won by the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers at the AAG Meeting in Las Vegas on March 24, and UCSB grad student Ted Eckmann was one of nine members of the winning team, all of whom received a deluxe world atlas and travel book from event sponsors Penguin Books and National Geographic.
Sample Geography Bowl questions:
- The goal of this architect was to create a map with a minimal amount of distortion to the shape and relative area of the earth’s landmasses. He created his projection, known as the Dymaxion (die-MAX-ee-on) projection, by dividing the earth into triangular shapes and then “unfolding” them onto a flat plane. Name this American, who also designed the geodesic dome, and the buildings of Montreal’s World’s Fair, Expo 67.
- In 2003, Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. All of the present-day states that border the Mississippi River share at least a part of their boundary with the original Purchase. However, very little of the rest of the boundary of the Purchase has been used to delineate present-day state boundaries. Part of the border between which two states is the only border not on the Mississippi that was once the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase?
- Imagine the contiguous 48 states, then imagine a layer in GIS of points representing the states’ 48 capital cities. One GIS analysis of this point pattern might create new states, defining the boundaries such that every point within the new states would be closer to its capital city than any other capital city. In this analysis, both New York City and Philadelphia would become part of New Jersey, since both cities are closer to Trenton than to their own capital cities. What name is given this GIS analysis technique that is the basis for nearest neighbor interpolations?
(Editor’s note: more questions, and their answers, at
