"Mathematics: 148 points!"
The top students in the class muttered in disbelief. They all knew how difficult this math paper had been. Scoring 120 was already impressive, yet Chen Zhao had somehow racked up 148 points!
Everyone was amazed. Only Chen Zhao frowned.
He'd thought he'd gotten a perfect score in math. How had he lost two points? Had the teacher marked it wrong?
When the papers were handed back, Chen Zhao discovered that he'd gotten every problem right. But on two of the longer questions, he'd forgotten to write the word "Solution," and he'd lost a point for each one. He'd been undone by a silly oversight.
"English: 110 points." The homeroom teacher paused, then continued, "That's a little low. If you put some effort into English, you should be able to improve by twenty points pretty easily."
Chen Zhao nodded. He really wasn't happy with that score. He'd lost forty points in English alone. He'd have to buckle down and study it.
"Comprehensive science: 295 points, also the highest score in the school!" the homeroom teacher announced, raising his voice.
The class erupted. Most students couldn't even break 200 in comprehensive science, but Chen Zhao had scored 295—just five points short of perfect! What kind of unbelievable talent was that? He was practically superhuman!
Chen Zhao was quite satisfied with his comprehensive science score. He'd been unsure about a few subquestions and had gone with his gut. He'd expected to get somewhere around 270 or 280, so scoring 295 was a wonderful surprise.
Meanwhile, upstairs, in the elite class.
The elite class had been formed just a few months ago. The school had selected the top fifty students in the grade from across all the classes and assigned them the best teachers. The goal was to give these outstanding students special attention and prepare them to compete for places at Tsinghua University and Peking University, bringing honor to the school.
The homeroom teacher walked in with the score sheet and began reading out the results.
The top students sat up straight, especially the three students seated at the front: Ma Jianjun, Zhao Xiaobai, and Zhang Fan. All three looked nervous and eager. They'd always taken the top three places in the school. Surely nothing had changed this time?
The homeroom teacher began, "First place: Ma Jianjun, 688 points, second place in the grade."
Ma Jianjun was delighted at first, but his smile soon froze.
Second place in the grade...?
How could he be second in the grade?
The whole class burst into an uproar. Ma Jianjun had been top of the grade for several months in a row, and nobody had imagined he'd ever drop to second place! The crucial thing was that Ma Jianjun was the top student in the elite class, yet he hadn't come first in the grade. That meant the top student was in another class!
Zhao Xiaobai caught on. "Oh no, I'm down to third in the grade!"
Zhang Fan caught on too. "Oh no, I'm down to fourth!"
The homeroom teacher continued reading the scores. Halfway through, Ma Jianjun raised his hand and interrupted him.
Ma Jianjun's face had gone pale, and his eyes were red. "Teacher, who came first in the grade? What was their score?"
The homeroom teacher gave Ma Jianjun a meaningful look. "First in the grade was Chen Zhao, from Class One, with 703 points."
Ma Jianjun was stunned.
Chen Zhao?
The same Chen Zhao who'd come third from the bottom in the school last time?
703 points! A full fifteen points more than him!
Ma Jianjun felt dizzy. It was hard to accept. After holding on to first place in the grade for so long, he'd been overtaken so easily by some unremarkable kid?
Chen Zhao had no idea what a sensation his first-place score had caused in the elite class. He was busy thinking about his results.
The situation was clear now. He'd done well in the other subjects, but his English was awful. He needed to focus on improving it.
But... how was he supposed to improve his English?
Chen Zhao was at a loss. He'd always been bad at English, and he didn't even know how to study it.
"What's the best way to improve your English score?" Chen Zhao nudged his deskmate, Xu Lanlan.
Xu Lanlan thought for a moment. "I got fifty in English."
Never mind. That had been a waste of a question.
He'd forgotten he was sitting in the nest of struggling students. Not one of the students around him had passed English. He'd picked the wrong people to ask.
After thinking it over, Chen Zhao decided he first needed to expand his vocabulary. Vocabulary was the foundation of a language, after all!
But how could he expand his vocabulary?
He'd already memorized all the word lists at the back of his English textbooks, yet he'd barely managed to score 110 on this exam. Memorizing the textbook word lists wouldn't be enough to raise his score further.
He had it: he'd memorize a dictionary!
Chen Zhao nudged Xu Lanlan. "Did you bring your Great English-Chinese Dictionary? Can I take a look?"
Xu Lanlan nodded and pulled a book thicker than a brick out of her schoolbag. It had a blue cover, with the words "Great English-Chinese Dictionary" printed across it. She handed it to Chen Zhao.
"What are you going to do with it? Look up words?" Xu Lanlan asked.
"No." Chen Zhao smiled. "I'm going to memorize the whole dictionary."
Xu Lanlan gave him a complicated look: part "he's completely nuts," part "are top students always this incredible?" and part "terrifying." She couldn't believe he'd decided to do that.
Chen Zhao opened the dictionary to the first page and sucked in a sharp breath!
The print was tiny as millet! Squinting at it, he could barely make out what looked like a swarm of ants crawling over the page. One page of the dictionary held as much text as three or four pages in an ordinary book!
He flipped to the last page and checked the page number. His face turned deathly pale!
There were 1,769 pages in all!
That was an absurd number!
English really was freaking vast and profound!
But there was no helping it. If he wanted to improve his English, he had to expand his vocabulary. And the simplest, most direct, and most effective way to do that was to memorize the dictionary!
Reluctantly, Chen Zhao started with the first line of the first page.
He kept at it for the entire morning. Teachers came and went for their classes, but Chen Zhao never even looked up. He focused completely on memorizing the dictionary. After all, he was already near the top in his other subjects, so it didn't matter much whether he paid attention in class. The teachers knew he already understood everything, so they left him alone.
When school let out for lunch, Chen Zhao checked how far he'd gotten. He'd reached page one hundred.
He did the math. If he memorized one hundred pages in the morning, another hundred in the afternoon, and fifty in the evening, he could get through 250 pages a day.
Five hundred pages in two days.
A thousand pages in four.
He could finish the whole thing in a little over a week.
That was a pretty good pace. Even if he had to do other things along the way, he'd finish in two weeks at most. He'd still have time to catch up before the joint exam.
Chen Zhao began memorizing the English dictionary like crazy.
In class, he memorized the dictionary.
Between classes, he memorized the dictionary.
At mealtimes, he memorized the dictionary.
While sleeping... well, he couldn't memorize the dictionary then.
At first, Xu Lanlan was the only one watching Chen Zhao memorize the dictionary. Then the students around them started watching too. Before long, the whole class had gathered around. Eventually, even students from other classes heard about it: Class One had a genius who'd come first in the grade and was now staying up day and night to memorize the Great English-Chinese Dictionary!
But even with people crowding around him, Chen Zhao never looked up. He kept his head down, completely absorbed, his mind filled with English words and their meanings.
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