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.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
RSS