BUDAPEST, Hungary - They correctly identified a photograph of the Mayan ruins in Tikal, Guatemala, gained an early lead and never looked back.

A team of three American teenagers on Thursday won the National Geographic World Championship, the fourth consecutive U.S. victory in the contest that tests knowledge of geography.

Russia took the silver medal, passing Canada in the penultimate round, when they noticed that unlike Iberia, Arabia, Kamchatka and Baja California, Siberia is not a peninsula.

"The questions were tough and they involved lots of thinking," said U.S. team captain Andrew Wojtanik, 15, of Overland Park, Kan.

His teammates - Karan Takhar, 14, of North Attleboro, Mass., and Jesse Weinberg, 14, of Coral Gables, Fla. - also said the contest had drained their energies.

"It's such a great experience but once you're done, it's really tiring," said Takhar, adding that his plan was to "sleep first, then celebrate."

One team each from 18 countries - including newcomers Spain and Taiwan - took part in the seventh edition of the event, held for the first time in a non-English-speaking country.

Qualifiers reached the world championship through competitions in their home countries - some individually, others in teams - and faced wide-ranging odds to make it to Budapest. Some 5 million students take part in U.S. geography bees, compared with 2,000 in Hungary and 3,000 in Spain.

Team and individual activities in the final included recognizing national capitals on maps without borderlines, identifying countries based on population graphs and detecting errors on maps.