Indian-American children have made it a habit of winning the US’s hugely-popular National Spelling Bee and National Geographic Bee contests in recent years. And 13-year-old Akhil Rekulapelli from Ashburn, Virginia kept it going on Wednesday, walking away with this year’s $50,000 National Geographic Bee championship. The runner-up also turned out to be another Indian boy, 11-year-old Ameya Majumdar from Tampa, Florida.
The question that decided this year’s championship was about naming the African country in which a city called Oyala is being built in a rainforest, 65 miles east of Bata. Akhil had the right answer: Equatorial Guinea.Akhil, who wants to attend Stanford University and become a doctor, says he pored over the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Wikipedia and other Web sites and books to learn about each country and province and their major cities, besides studying mountain ranges and lakes, rivers and tributaries.
Akhil outlasted nine other finalists and answered all the three questions correctly in the final showdown with Ameya, who won the $25,000 runner-up scholarship. Ameya wowed the audience at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, DC by correctly answering a question on the Earth’s diameter at the equator — 7,926 miles.