After a half-hour drive, the Nangang Second High School Math Olympiad team's bus arrived at Provincial Experimental High School.
This was the venue for this year's Provincial High School Mathematics League in the Nangang region.
Every province in the country held its own mathematics league, organized independently.
The Nanyue Province High School Mathematics League was jointly hosted by the Provincial Department of Education and the Provincial Mathematics Society, and was held once a year.
The competition took the form of an exam. Every contestant took the same test, with a time limit of 90 minutes. This was the First Test.
The First Test had three score thresholds, from highest to lowest: the provincial team cutoff, first prize, and second prize.
According to past results, 40% of contestants earned second prize, while 10% won first prize.
The provincial team cutoff was extremely difficult to reach. Only 0.8% of contestants made it.
The students who made it to the Mathematics League Competition were all the top math students at their schools, one in a hundred.
After that, only eight in a thousand made it through, and then half of those were eliminated. The handful who remained would represent the provincial team at the national competition. That was the second round.
Shen Qi wanted to make it through. That was why he had come.
The organizers checked every contestant's student ID according to procedure. Phones and all other electronic devices were forbidden in the exam hall.
A staff member escorted Shen Qi to a classroom on the second floor of the teaching building. Four columns of desks stood inside, with seven rows in each, for a total of 28 contestants taking the exam together.
Shen Qi and his eleven teammates were assigned to twelve different classrooms. His seat was in the first row of the second column.
He sat down, laid out his ballpoint pen, pencil, ruler, compass, and eraser, then waited for the First Test paper to be handed out.
Before distributing the test papers, the invigilators first gave each contestant sheets of scratch paper.
Apart from the necessary writing and measuring tools, contestants weren't allowed to bring in even a scrap of paper. The country was extremely strict about selecting math talent. If one person cheated, the entire school was blacklisted.
Shen Qi closed his eyes to rest. Don't get anxious. Don't panic. I've done several Mathematics League papers before. This stuff isn't hard at all.
At ten o'clock sharp, the First Test began.
There were two types of questions on the test.
Eight fill-in-the-blank questions, worth eight points each, for a total of 64 points.
Three written-response and proof questions, worth 56 points.
The test was worth 120 points in total.
The test writers seemed to favor geometry. Of the eleven questions, eight were geometry problems.
They were probably following the trend of recent IMO competitions. Geometry had become popular internationally, and tricky geometry problems had been appearing at the IMO time and again.
The fill-in-the-blank questions were too easy for Shen Qi. This type of question didn't require him to show his derivation or proof; he just had to write down the answer.
You don't care whether I use Non-Euclidean Geometry or Coordinate Geometry. Just give you the right answer, and that's enough.
Shen Qi quickly finished all eight fill-in-the-blank questions and moved on to the three written-response and proof problems.
The first was a Solid Geometry proof. A sphere was drawn on the test, with a triangular pyramid inside it. The contestants had to prove that the pyramid's centroid and the sphere's center of gravity coincided.
The second was Plane Analytic Geometry. The contestants had to prove that a certain curve could never pass through the intersection of the x- and y-axes, point o.
The third was pure algebra. They had to find a complex number α that made a given equation hold.
"Not hard. Really, it's not hard at all. Did I somehow get a fake test paper?"
In no time, Shen Qi had written out the proofs, solutions, and answers to all three questions on his scratch paper.
Afraid he really had gotten a fake test, he checked his work several times before he dared copy it onto the test paper. His hand holding the ballpoint pen trembled slightly.
"I heard fewer than one percent make the provincial team cutoff. If I get a perfect score, I'll definitely be in that one percent. Unless this test is so easy everyone can get full marks?"
Shen Qi glanced to his left, then right, then looked behind him.
The guy on his left was sweating buckets. It wasn't hot; the classroom had air conditioning, and Shen Qi was actually feeling cold.
The girl on his right had her brows knitted tight, as if she'd run into a problem she couldn't solve.
The kid behind him looked utterly dejected. He must be questioning his life choices.
All the signs suggested Shen Qi was the only one in the exam hall who thought the test was easy. Everyone else was struggling.
"Hey, stop looking around!" The invigilator walked up to Shen Qi's desk and rapped on it sternly.
"Teacher, can I ask who wrote this test?" Shen Qi whispered.
"I don't know!"
"Fine, fine. I'll hand it in."
Shen Qi packed his stationery into his schoolbag and laid his test paper flat on the desk.
He slung on his schoolbag, stood up with his hands in his pockets, and left the exam hall at an easy pace.
After the morning's First Test ended, the Provincial Mathematics Society's graders began marking the Nangang region's papers that afternoon.
Nangang City was the provincial capital, and the Provincial Mathematics Society's headquarters were based in this major coastal city in the south.
More than 1,200 high school students who loved math had signed up for the province-wide competition. More than half of them were from Nangang City alone. After all, it was an international metropolis with a large population and superior educational resources.
Marking in the Nangang region lasted from two in the afternoon until eight at night. Ten graders worked at once, marking more than 600 First Test papers.
Two of the younger women handled the statistics, recording the results.
"Yu Huabo, Provincial Experimental High School, 101 points."
"Zhou Jian, Southern Normal University Affiliated Middle School, 98 points."
"Meng Tianqiang, Second Middle School, 94 points."
"Li Xinyan, Sixth Middle School, 82 points."
"Zhao Liang, Eighth Middle School, 8 points... Poor kid. He only got one fill-in-the-blank question right."
"Huo Jiawen, Second Middle School, 1 point... Where did that one point come from? A consolation prize?"
"Let me see this one-point kid's paper. Sure enough, it's a consolation prize. He got every fill-in-the-blank question wrong, and every written-response and proof question wrong too. The grader probably gave him one point so he wouldn't have to face the shock of getting zero."
"Giving you one point less keeps you humble; giving you only one point keeps you from breaking down? Math teachers are impossible to resist when they get funny. Teehee."
The two statisticians at the Provincial Mathematics Society entered the scores from the completed papers into a computer and sorted them. They were both math education interns, and would most likely go on to teach math at elementary or middle schools.
"This year's First Test was so hard. We've been entering scores this whole time, and we still haven't seen a single perfect score."
"I bet the first-prize cutoff will be 90 points this year. It was 100 last year."
"Back to work. Shen Qi, Second Middle School... Holy moly!"
"What's with you?"
"Shen Qi, Second Middle School, 120 points! The first perfect score is from Second Middle School!"
"Second Middle School is a top school too. What's so surprising? Let me see the work of this perfect-score kid. Huh? What's with the three question marks after 120?"
Shen Qi's test showed a score of 120, followed by three question marks. Together, it read "120???"
"I'll ask the graders about paper number 519. What's the deal with this Second Middle School kid's 120?"
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