Staff report
LANDIS ó Corriher-Lipe eighth-grader Zachary Ford answered the first six questions correctly at last week’s N.C. Geographic Bee in Raleigh.But he didn’t make it to the final round of the state contest, according to Scotty Thomas, assistant principal at the Landis middle school, who accompanied Ford to the state contest.
“He did a great job, and we are real proud of him,” Thomas said this week.
Ford was the only student from the Rowan-Salisbury School System to qualify for the state contest. And he scored among the top 100 students in the state on a qualifying geography test all local winners had to take.
Actually, because of a tie in test scores, 101 students gathered in Raleigh Friday for the state Geographic Bee, Thomas said. Organizers then divided those students into five groups for the first round of eight questions.
The first six questions in the first round came in multiple-choice format, and Zachary aced those. But the final two required each student to produce an answer.
Zach, 13, got a very difficult question about an obscure country on the African continent, Thomas said.
“I would never have known the answer to that,” the assistant principal added.
In the end, 16 students earned perfect scores in the first round and continued to the championship round, Thomas said. The state winner earned the right to compete later in the National Geographic Bee in Washington, D.C.