SIMI VALLEY : Student Benefits From Playing Game

Valley View Junior High School eighth-grade student Tracy Murphy said she never dreamed that playing a board game version of the TV game show “Jeopardy” would pay off in school.

But it did Thursday as Tracy, 13, beat out about 30 other seventh- and eighth-grade students at the Simi Valley school’s geography bee championship. The event was part of the National Geographic Society’s annual National Geography Bee for fourth- through eighth-grade students.

“I was real nervous,” said Tracy, who was still shaking five minutes after the hourlong match ended.

Murphy attributes much of her success to studying the answers to geography questions in a home version of “Jeopardy.” She now qualifies to take a written geography test that will determine whether she’s eligible to be among 100 California students who will compete for the state championship in Sacramento on April 2.

“If I go to Sacramento, I can stay with my grandparents there,” she said.

By process of elimination, Thursday’s match at Valley View came down to Murphy and seventh-grader Niralish Shah, who lost when she could not answer this question: “The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 began at the mouth of one river and ended at the mouth of another. Name one of these two rivers.”

The answer: the Columbia River or the Missouri River.

Questions asked in the bee pertain not only to names and locations, but to worldwide culture, economics and history.

Murphy and other first-place finishers at participating county schools are rewarded with a National Geographic board game. Students who advance to the state championship, which offers the winner $100 cash and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the May 26 national geography championship. First prize includes a $25,000 college scholarship.

This year more than 6 million students from about 46,000 schools nationwide held geography bees, said National Geographic Society spokeswoman Barbara Fallon in Washington.

Amanda Olson, 11, a sixth-grade student at Cypress Elementary School in Newbury Park, has won her school’s contest three years in a row. “I’m a good memorizer, and I read a lot,” Amanda said.

A 1988 Gallup Poll study commissioned by National Geographic showed that, of 10 countries surveyed, 18- to 24-year-old U. S. citizens ranked last in their knowledge of basic world geography.