Jiangbei University, Room 104 of the men's dormitory.
Song Yi, Zheng Jinbao, and Ma Zhong all lay on their beds, their eyes bloodshot and their faces exhausted.
When they saw the Mathematical Modeling Contest questions in the tiered classroom, they were completely dumbfounded.
If it had been an individual competition, Song Yi and Zheng Jinbao would definitely have handed in blank papers.
Too difficult? That made the choice easy—just don't do it. But the Mathematical Modeling Contest was a team competition with groups of three.
Their teammates would never allow them to hand in blank papers.
Left with no choice, Song Yi and Zheng Jinbao could only follow their teammates and work on the problems.
Only after spending a great deal of time looking through reference materials did they begin to get the slightest idea of how to approach them.
Over the past three days, they had barely slept or rested, calculating and designing like mad. They had nearly worked themselves into collapse.
Song Yi asked, "Which problem did you choose?"
"The third one—designing a parking lot," Ma Zhong replied.
"I chose that one too. My teammates said it was the easiest, but it was still so complicated to do," Song Yi said.
As he spoke, Song Yi seemed to recall the terror of frantically searching for materials and calculating over the past three days, and he could not help sighing.
Zheng Jinbao picked his nose and said, "The third question is the easiest? Shouldn't the second one, designing a drainage system, be the easiest?"
Ma Zhong said, "The second question is the hardest. A drainage system involves terrain, pressure, soil quality, materials, and many other factors."
"If it were simple, there wouldn't be so many cities in our country where the roads get flooded whenever there's heavy rain."
Zheng