After Fang Bai sat down, Teacher Mo immediately handed out the exam papers.
After receiving his paper, Fang Bai glanced at the essay prompt, roughly looked over the questions, and only then began answering them.
Every student was curious about this. The first thing they did upon receiving an exam paper was look at the essay prompt.
Two and a half hours later, Fang Bai handed in his paper. He had barely managed to finish the essay, and he thought that he absolutely could not do this during the college entrance exam.
There were seven subjects in total, including evening exams, and everything would be finished in two days.
On the third day, they began going over the papers. While the papers were being reviewed, Fang Bai went to the classroom to listen.
On the second day of Fang Bai's exams, his parents set up their stall as usual to sell televisions. They sold forty that day, and before they could sell the remaining twenty-eight, it started to rain.
Fortunately, they had prepared a rain tarp, and the rain was not heavy. Otherwise, the televisions could easily have gotten soaked, and that would have been a huge problem.
That evening, Fang Bai counted the money with his parents. Their sales revenue was 23,000 yuan.
Fang Bai's wealth had also reached 88,000 yuan, leaving him just one step away from leveling up.
He had thought that if they finished the exams that day and sold all sixty-eight televisions, it would definitely be enough for him to level up.
Who would have expected such unforeseen weather? It actually rained.
It was already November. Logically speaking, rain was rare in this season.
No matter what, weather had to be taken into consideration when doing business.
There was still a high chance of rain over the next few days, so Fang Bai reminded his parents to watch out for it if they set up their stall.
That night, Fang Bai and his parents counted how many televisions they still had at home that could be sold.
At present, they had repaired a total of 160 televisions and sold 140 of them.
Fang Bai had bought 390 televisions and a large batch of parts, spending 11,320 yuan. Including transportation and other expenses, it came to a little over 12,000 yuan.
They could probably repair several dozen more televisions. Adding the twenty that had yet to be sold, they could still bring in around 40,000 yuan in revenue.
In other words, Fang Bai could make more than 110,000 yuan from this truckload of televisions, with a profit margin of around 1,000 percent. It was outrageously profitable.
The next day,
Fang Bai did not go to school for the time being. He first had to deal with business matters.
He did not arrive at school until the second period was almost over.
The moment he stepped into the classroom, his classmates all looked at him strangely.
Before he could even sit down, Wang Dakai pointed at the exam paper on his desk and said enviously, "Boss, you're incredible. You got 83 in english."
"Is 83 that high?"
"It's amazing, okay? You're first in the class. I only got 55."
"I only got 63." Zhang Xiao Ai, who sat in the front row, turned around with her eyes curved into crescent moons as she smiled. "Fang Bai, how do you study english?"
Fang Bai let out an "Oh." So that was it.
The full score was 100. An 83 was only so-so to him. The questions had been fairly easy. It could only be said that they had not done very well.
The Current year students had not taken this monthly exam. They were still rushing through their lessons, and even if they took mock exams now, they could not outperform the Repeating students. They would only catch up next semester.
Fang Bai glanced at Zhang Xiao Ai, who was waiting for an answer. After thinking for a moment, he said, "Me? I just memorize more sentences. Every morning after I get up, after lunch, and before I go to sleep at night, I review the words I've memorized.
"That's how I do it. It might not necessarily suit you."
"That's it?" Zhang Xiao Ai widened her eyes. It did not seem like any special study method.
Fang Bai spread his hands. "Yeah, that's it. But how many people can keep it up?"
Zhang Xiao Ai asked again, "That does seem true. But do I have to memorize them?"
"If you don't memorize english, why study it? If you don't memorize it, can you speak it?" Fang Bai countered, glancing at the big guy.
When Wang Dakai saw Fang Bai looking at him, he hurriedly nodded. Whatever the boss said had to make sense.
Zhang Xiao Ai, on the other hand, did not care much. "It's just for exams. Do you really think we'll ever use it?"
"I don't think we'll use it either," Zhang Xiao Ai's deskmate said. Several nearby classmates also leaned closer when they heard them discussing english.
Fang Bai looked at the other students, and they all seemed to agree with that view.
He could not blame them. They did not understand the real situation. Even their english teacher might not understand it.
He could only explain patiently, "If you do international trade, translation, go abroad, or communicate with foreigners, you definitely need english. I won't go into those.
"If you want to take postgraduate entrance exams or do academic research in the future, your english definitely has to be good. Otherwise, how will you write and publish papers? Fine, that may sound a bit far off.
"Then let's talk about work. If you do scientific research, the most advanced technical materials are all in foreign languages. If you don't understand english, who are you going to rely on? Professional translators might not understand technical terms, either. The Oxford Dictionary has tens of thousands of words alone. Who can remember that many?
"There are many places where english is needed, and many where it isn't. But if you learn it well, the range of paths you can choose becomes much broader..."
Fang Bai explained slowly. In this era, there were not even translation apps. Doing scientific research without understanding english was truly troublesome.
He glanced at the big guy, who was still nodding vigorously in agreement.
Fang Bai's words broadened the horizons of the surrounding students, making them admire him even more.
"Fang Bai, you know so much. No one has ever told us these things."
"Yeah, even the Homeroom Teacher never mentioned them."
"The boss is the boss. It's perfectly normal for him to know more than us."
Wang Dakai thought speaking english was badass. Spouting a few english lines like the high-class figures in movies would feel incredibly cool. That was his motivation to study.
He had no motivation for anything else.
There were two things Fang Bai had always made him admire: mystery and sincerity toward others.
Now there was a third: being good at english!
At first, the other students had admired Fang Bai only because they felt sorry for his broken finger.
They also admired how eloquent he was. Even the president of the school's student union was not as good at talking as he was.
But as time passed, Fang Bai often skipped class, making his classmates feel that he was just fooling around. He did not seem like someone who had come to repeat a year at all; it seemed more like he was merely going through the motions.
Now that Fang Bai's english was far better than theirs, everyone was somewhat surprised and regarded him more highly.
After chatting for a while, Fang Bai began checking his english exam paper. Seeing him study so seriously, no one disturbed him anymore.
His grades were already so good, yet he still worked so hard. They had no reason not to work hard too.
It was just that they usually did not see him putting in the effort.
Teacher Mo had marked and corrected the mistakes on Fang Bai's paper, so he did not need to compare it against the answers to know where he had gone wrong.
The third period was Chinese.
The teacher still handed out the exam papers after reading out the scores.
"Fang Bai, 92 points. Not bad. Review the basic questions more, and you can improve quite a bit."
"Chen Yang, 72 points. Your essay was an utter mess."
[Chinese and Mathematics: 120 points each. english, physics, Chemistry, and Politics: 100 points each. Biology: 70 points. Total: 710 points.]
Fang Bai's Chinese was at the upper-middle level in the class. He was fairly satisfied with this score, since he had not reviewed much anyway.
After looking over the paper, he found that he had basically gotten the reading comprehension questions right. He had mainly lost points on basic questions, even getting some standard poetry lines wrong.
After Chinese, they had physics and Mathematics that afternoon. Fang Bai scored 65 and 100, respectively, still placing him in the upper-middle range of the class.
The class did not find his scores strange. The highest physics score in the grade was 80, while Mathematics had reached 112.
The next morning, they handed out the final Chemistry paper. Fang Bai had scored 75.
Aside from his decent english score, his other subjects were all upper-middle level: 65 in Politics and 50 in Biology.
But taken together, his results were anything but ordinary. His total score was 535, considerably higher than most students.
By the third period, it was Homeroom Teacher Zhan Feng's class.
Over the past two days, the teachers of every subject had been working overtime to mark the papers. Zhan Feng had received all the scores yesterday and only finished compiling them that morning.
After compiling them, she compared each student's scores with their college entrance exam results.
Although these were different from the college entrance exam papers, they still had considerable reference value. After all, they were mock exams with similar difficulty.
Overall, the students had not changed much, though several had improved noticeably.
But Fang Bai's score had improved the fastest: up 55 points!
His total had also reached 535, placing him fifth in class and fourteenth in the school.
Under normal circumstances, if Fang Bai could remain steady and improve a little more, he would have a chance of reaching the key university cutoff in next year's college entrance exam.
The Repeater Class did not lack students who could clear the Undergraduate Line, but very few could pass the key university cutoff. Only a handful had done so in the entire school last year.
Just over a dozen!
The vast majority of them had come from the Repeater Classes, while only a few were Current year students.
There were six Repeater Classes in the school, with around four hundred students in total, while there were nearly a thousand Current year students.
Repeater Classes One, Two, and Three were advanced classes, aiming for undergraduate and key universities. Classes Four, Five, and Six aimed for better vocational colleges.
Zhan Feng entered the classroom and found that Fang Bai was absent.
Standing at the podium, she swept her gaze across the students below and said calmly,
"Students, the scores have been compiled. The highest score in the school was 565, from Class Two.
"Our class's Wu Jian scored 553, Third in School.
"He was two points short of the key university cutoff in this year's college entrance exam. He did not perform well, so I hope he continues working hard!
"...
"Fifth in class, Fang Bai, scored 535. His improvement was tremendous, 55 points higher than his college entrance exam score. He was also the student who improved the most in the class, so I would like to give him special praise..."
The class was not surprised by the scores of the first four students, since that was their normal performance.
But Fang Bai's total score truly shocked everyone.
He skipped class so often, yet his score had improved so much. It was outrageous!
There was no reason for it.
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