Taiwan last week won two gold, one silver and one bronze at the 20th International Geography Olympiad in Ireland, ranking fourth behind the US, Australia and Indonesia.
This year’s result was Taiwan’s best performance in the international geography competition for 16 to 19-year-old students, which has been held annually since 1996.
Su Po-yuan (蘇柏元), a Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo High School graduate, and Tseng Hsiang-chien (曾向謙), a graduate from Taichung Municipal Taichung First Senior High School, each won golds at the event, held from Monday to Saturday last week.
Photo courtesy of Republic of China Geography Society via CNA
Tien Hsiu-ming (田修明), a student from the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University, won a silver, and Chi Chun-han (紀均翰), a Taichung Municipal Taichung First Senior High School graduate, bagged a bronze.
The competition consists of three parts: a written test, a multimedia test and a substantial fieldwork exercise, the Taiwan Geography Olympiad and Committee said in a statement on Sunday.
Competitors are required to answer all test questions in English.
Taiwan’s team was led by Ho Lih-der (何立德), head of National Kaohsiung Normal University’s Department of Geography, and Wang Sen-do (王聖鐸), an associate professor in National Taiwan Normal University’s Department of Geography. The department oversaw the training of the four-member team.
This year’s competition, held at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, featured Test questions based on the geographical features of the campus, downtown streets and the area in front of the train station in Maynooth, a town of about 17,000, west of Dublin.
Contestants were asked to analyze the quality of campus life, sidewalk accessibility and land use based on UN Sustainable Development Goals indicators, Wang said.
In addition to observing, recording and evaluating, contestants also had to draw landscapes and land-use maps in a short period, he said.
That posed a great challenge, but the performance of the four Taiwanese contestants was remarkable, he added.
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