On Thursday 12th October, five Third Form geographers took part in the local round of the Geographical Association’s Worldwise Quiz, which tests their knowledge of both human and physical geography as well as the general ‘place’ knowledge. Oundle entered two teams and were competing against four other schools in the South Lincolnshire round of the quiz.
The team comprised of Robert Brettle (B), Marcus McDevitt (L) and Alexander Jones (Ldr) were delighted to finish first on an impressive score of 110, 20 points ahead of the team in second place, having led the competition from the start. Our smaller team comprised of Charlie Martin (C) and Will Robertson (Ldr) finished a respectable sixth out of ten teams.
There were eight rounds in the competition, our most successful being the Alphabet round, where pupils were asked 26 questions with each answer beginning with one letter of the alphabet, such as ‘What H is an English town and the capital of Nova Scotia in Canada’.
The most challenging round of the evening was titled My Escape, where pupils were given ten statements describing a migrant’s journey, e.g. ‘As I cross the River Plate which is flowing South East towards the Atlantic Ocean, I have to paddle hard to the North East to reach my destination’, and they gained two points for stating the source and destination country of each migrant.
Our pupils competed enthusiastically and were pleased to receive their prizes of a large Collins Atlas at the end of the evening. We left on tenterhooks, not knowing whether our place in the regional round was confirmed due to the North Lincolnshire round of the competition happening simultaneously and their result not coming through. Unfortunately, morning broke and news came in that the Priory Academy had just pipped us by four points.
We look forward to entering our team again next year to what is a worthwhile and very enjoyable event, which was this year hosted in fantastic fashion by Mr Morris at Stamford School.
M Chapman