Geography Cup
Encyclopedia
The Geography Cup is an online
, international
competition between the United States
and the United Kingdom
, with the aim of determining which nation collectively knows more about geography
. It was also intended to raise awareness of the importance of world geography in the modern world
. Any resident of the U.S. or UK could participate to test their own geographic knowledge and to support their nation. The first (and so far only) competition took place between 12 November and 31 December 2006 to coincide with Geography Awareness Week, the third week in November.
, and Daniel Raven-Ellison from Reading, Berkshire
. Both became committed to expanding public
awareness of the importance of geography after seeing the results of poll
s illustrating Americans' and Britons' startling lack of geographical knowledge. A poll of young Americans conducted in the United States by National Geographic in 2006 found that only 37% of those polled could find Iraq
on a map, and half could not even find the state of New York
.
Andresen and Raven-Ellison created the competition for two main reasons. One reason was to determine whether people who live in the United States or people who live in the United Kingdom knew more about world geography. However, the main reason was to encourage people to learn more about world geography and to understand the importance of geography. The two creators plan to hold the competition yearly beginning in the third week in November to coincide with Geography Awareness Week, established in the United States by Ronald Reagan
in 1987.
determined which country a user lived in based on their IP address
and automatically put the user into the correct team
. The quiz
consisted of thirteen random, geography-related questions that had to be answered in a total of two minutes. The first ten questions consisted of placing randomly-selected countries
onto a blank political map. The final three questions consisted of geography-related trivia questions that were answered by selecting the correct country on the blank map
. Each user could practice, affect their own score, and learn about geography by playing as many times as they wanted to, but only three plays per 24-hour period could affect their nation's score.
The randomly-selected countries could be any country (or territory) in the world. This included the large and well-known regions (Russia
, Canada
, United States
, etc.) as well as smaller and more obscure nations (Palau
, Djibouti
, Togo
, etc.). Most participants had little trouble recognizing the major Europe
an and Asia
n countries but many people on both teams had trouble locating small Pacific Islands
and some African countries.
The trivia questions were sometimes related directly to geography, e. g., "Made up of 33 atolls, which country straddles both the equator and the International Date Line?
". However, some were about current events to test if participants knew where, geographically, news stories were taking place, e. g., "Which Asian country recently made its first test of a nuclear weapon?
".
between the United States and the United Kingdom, the score
of each team was determined by an average percentage
based on the percentage scores of each individual player. After each game, a player could see how he or she affected their nation's score and their own personal percentage. Because there were 13 questions, each question was worth approximately 7.7%.
reported some problems with the website. Also, some US and UK residents were rejected or put into the incorrect team because their internet service provider
used overseas servers
. Finally, after the surge of media attention following the Reuters
and Christian Science Monitor articles, the number of users exceeded the capacity of the servers, causing a temporary suspension of the competition.
s. It is also sponsored by Give Geography Its Place, founded by Daniel Raven-Ellison and David Rayner to raise awareness of the importance geography in UK media. The third sponsor is Nelson Thornes, a UK-based educational publisher owned by Wolters Kluwer
.
(GAIN), part of National Geographic EdNet, encouraged its members to participate in the competition in the belief that "It is only fitting that these two countries compete in a geography competition, as they both share the same widely-publicized affliction." Polls in the United States, including the National Geographic-Roper poll, and similar polls in the UK, which include a magazine poll cited by the BBC
, illustrate a glaring lack of geographic knowledge by young people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
. In addition, a group of geography teachers and enthusiasts from the UK on a Staffordshire Learning Net geography forum supported the competition and encouraged students to try to improve their nation's score.
ONLINE
ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....
, international
International
----International mostly means something that involves more than one country. The term international as a word means involvement of, interaction between or encompassing more than one nation, or generally beyond national boundaries...
competition between the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, with the aim of determining which nation collectively knows more about geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
. It was also intended to raise awareness of the importance of world geography in the modern world
Modern World
Modern World or The Modern World may refer to:*Modernity, a popular academic term.*The modern era, the age in which people today now live.*Modern World, a song by Wolf Parade from their 2005 album Apologies to the Queen Mary....
. Any resident of the U.S. or UK could participate to test their own geographic knowledge and to support their nation. The first (and so far only) competition took place between 12 November and 31 December 2006 to coincide with Geography Awareness Week, the third week in November.
Creation
The Geography Cup was created in late 2006 by two geography enthusiasts: Roger Andresen from Atlanta, GeorgiaAtlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
, and Daniel Raven-Ellison from Reading, Berkshire
Reading, Berkshire
Reading is a large town and unitary authority area in England. It is located in the Thames Valley at the confluence of the River Thames and River Kennet, and on both the Great Western Main Line railway and the M4 motorway, some west of London....
. Both became committed to expanding public
Public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science,...
awareness of the importance of geography after seeing the results of poll
Poll
Poll, polled or polling may refer to:- Figurative head counts :* Polling, voting* Show of hands, voting* Opinion poll* The polls, polling places* Poll, an election* Polling , sequential interrogation of devices- Other :...
s illustrating Americans' and Britons' startling lack of geographical knowledge. A poll of young Americans conducted in the United States by National Geographic in 2006 found that only 37% of those polled could find Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
on a map, and half could not even find the state of New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
Andresen and Raven-Ellison created the competition for two main reasons. One reason was to determine whether people who live in the United States or people who live in the United Kingdom knew more about world geography. However, the main reason was to encourage people to learn more about world geography and to understand the importance of geography. The two creators plan to hold the competition yearly beginning in the third week in November to coincide with Geography Awareness Week, established in the United States by Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
in 1987.
Quiz
Any citizen of the USA or the UK was eligible to participate in the contest. Upon signup, the websiteWebsite
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
determined which country a user lived in based on their IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
and automatically put the user into the correct team
Team
A team comprises a group of people or animals linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team...
. The quiz
Quiz
A quiz is a form of game or mind sport in which the players attempt to answer questions correctly. In some countries, a quiz is also a brief assessment used in education and similar fields to measure growth in knowledge, abilities, and/or skills.Quizzes are usually scored in points and many...
consisted of thirteen random, geography-related questions that had to be answered in a total of two minutes. The first ten questions consisted of placing randomly-selected countries
Country
A country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with a previously...
onto a blank political map. The final three questions consisted of geography-related trivia questions that were answered by selecting the correct country on the blank map
Blank map
A blank map is a map that gives no information about what places are represented in it. It merely shows the land forms and water forms of a particular place. It is commonly used in schools to test the knowledge of students about the Geography of a place....
. Each user could practice, affect their own score, and learn about geography by playing as many times as they wanted to, but only three plays per 24-hour period could affect their nation's score.
The randomly-selected countries could be any country (or territory) in the world. This included the large and well-known regions (Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, etc.) as well as smaller and more obscure nations (Palau
Palau
Palau , officially the Republic of Palau , is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines and south of Tokyo. In 1978, after three decades as being part of the United Nations trusteeship, Palau chose independence instead of becoming part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a...
, Djibouti
Djibouti
Djibouti , officially the Republic of Djibouti , is a country in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by Eritrea in the north, Ethiopia in the west and south, and Somalia in the southeast. The remainder of the border is formed by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden at the east...
, Togo
Togo
Togo, officially the Togolese Republic , is a country in West Africa bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, on which the capital Lomé is located. Togo covers an area of approximately with a population of approximately...
, etc.). Most participants had little trouble recognizing the major Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
n countries but many people on both teams had trouble locating small Pacific Islands
Pacific Islands
The Pacific Islands comprise 20,000 to 30,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. The islands are also sometimes collectively called Oceania, although Oceania is sometimes defined as also including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago....
and some African countries.
The trivia questions were sometimes related directly to geography, e. g., "Made up of 33 atolls, which country straddles both the equator and the International Date Line?
Kiribati
Kiribati , officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The permanent population exceeds just over 100,000 , and is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island, dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres, straddling the...
". However, some were about current events to test if participants knew where, geographically, news stories were taking place, e. g., "Which Asian country recently made its first test of a nuclear weapon?
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
".
Scoring method
Due to the large difference in populationPopulation
A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...
between the United States and the United Kingdom, the score
Score (game)
In games, score refers to an abstract quantity associated with a player or team. Score is usually measured in the abstract unit of points, and events in the game can raise or lower the score of different parties...
of each team was determined by an average percentage
Percentage
In mathematics, a percentage is a way of expressing a number as a fraction of 100 . It is often denoted using the percent sign, “%”, or the abbreviation “pct”. For example, 45% is equal to 45/100, or 0.45.Percentages are used to express how large/small one quantity is, relative to another quantity...
based on the percentage scores of each individual player. After each game, a player could see how he or she affected their nation's score and their own personal percentage. Because there were 13 questions, each question was worth approximately 7.7%.
2006 final score
The USA won with a final accuracy score of 62.368% after trailing for a few days, while the UK lagged behind slightly at the end with an accuracy of 57.947%. The USA had 41,885 participants while the UK team had 10,820, indicating about 30% greater per capita participation in the UK.Website problems
Users in Britain using Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
reported some problems with the website. Also, some US and UK residents were rejected or put into the incorrect team because their internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
used overseas servers
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
. Finally, after the surge of media attention following the Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
and Christian Science Monitor articles, the number of users exceeded the capacity of the servers, causing a temporary suspension of the competition.
Sponsors
The Geography Cup was sponsored by A Broader View, founded by Roger Andresen to decrease geographical ignorance with geography puzzles and gameGame
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
s. It is also sponsored by Give Geography Its Place, founded by Daniel Raven-Ellison and David Rayner to raise awareness of the importance geography in UK media. The third sponsor is Nelson Thornes, a UK-based educational publisher owned by Wolters Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer N.V. is a global information services and publishing company. The company provides products and services for professionals in the health, tax, accounting, corporate, financial services, legal and regulatory sectors...
.
Support
The Geographic Alliance in NevadaNevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
(GAIN), part of National Geographic EdNet, encouraged its members to participate in the competition in the belief that "It is only fitting that these two countries compete in a geography competition, as they both share the same widely-publicized affliction." Polls in the United States, including the National Geographic-Roper poll, and similar polls in the UK, which include a magazine poll cited by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, illustrate a glaring lack of geographic knowledge by young people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
. In addition, a group of geography teachers and enthusiasts from the UK on a Staffordshire Learning Net geography forum supported the competition and encouraged students to try to improve their nation's score.
See also
- List of basic geography topics
- List of geography topics
- List of countries
- MapMapA map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes....
- CartographyCartographyCartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...