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February 2, 2012

CCS geo bee winner may get second chance at state competition

BY MICHELLE MILLER

STAFF WRITER

The pressure was on. Cooperstown sixth-grader Tom Knight had won his school district’s fifth-and-sixth-grade geography bee last year and said he felt that many were expecting him to pull a repeat. “I was going into the competition confident, but I was feeling much more pressure this time around,” Tom said Friday afternoon after winning in seven rounds.

Tom said he was feeling the added pressure so much so that he did more studying than last time.

Tom won in four rounds without missing a question last year. On Friday, he missed a question in round four and ended up going head-to-head with fifth-grader Nathaniel Miller. Both had answered their questions wrong in round six and Nathaniel missed another in round seven. Tom was all smiles when he got his question correct and realized he had won.

“I knew I had answered one question incorrectly after I said Denmark. I knew it was New Netherlands; that was my only regret,” Tom said.

“There were a lot of hard questions, but there were also a lot of easy ones,” he added.

The sixth-grader will take a six-page written test to see if he will qualify to move on to compete at the state level. Students must place in the top 100 scores to be able to participate.

Tom said he is not that nervous about having to take the written test having done it once already. He said he feels more comfortable with answering questions on paper rather than out loud with an audience. Although Tom was never told how well he did on his written test last year, he said he passed and ended up placed within the top 30 in the state.

“There I got seven out of eight right,” he said.

Elementary Principal Teresa Gorman said she believes that Tom will once again do well on the exam as he has exhibited consistent growth in his knowledge  of history and geographyand has experience taking the exam.

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