No Reason to Score So High

Fang Bai sat down, and Teacher Mo immediately handed out the exam papers.

After receiving the paper, Fang Bai glanced at the essay topic, skimmed through the questions, and then started working on them.

Every student had that curiosity—the first thing they did upon getting the paper was check the essay topic.

Two and a half hours later, Fang Bai turned in his paper, barely finishing the essay. He thought to himself that he absolutely couldn't do that during the college entrance exam.

There were seven subjects in total, with evening exams as well, all wrapped up in two days.

On the third day, they began reviewing the papers. When that happened, Fang Bai went to the classroom to listen.

The day after Fang Bai's exams started, his parents set up their street stall to sell TVs as usual. They sold 40 that day, but before they could move the remaining 28, it started raining.

Luckily, they had a tarp on hand, and the rain wasn't heavy, otherwise the TVs would have gotten soaked—and that would have been a huge problem.

That evening, Fang Bai counted money with his parents. The sales totaled 23,000 yuan.

Fang Bai's wealth had also reached 88,000 yuan, just one step away from leveling up.

He had thought that if he finished the exams and sold all 68 TVs that day, it would definitely be enough to level up.

Who would have guessed that the weather would take an unexpected turn and rain would fall?

It was November, and logically, this season rarely saw rain.

Regardless, when running a business, you had to account for weather factors.

Over the next few days, the chance of rain was still very high. Fang Bai reminded his parents that if they set up the stall, they needed to watch out for rain.

That night, Fang Bai and his parents tallied how many TVs they still had left to sell.

So far, they had repaired 160 TVs and sold 140.

Fang Bai had purchased 390 TVs and a large batch of parts, spending 11,320 yuan. Including transportation and other costs, it came to just over 12,000 yuan.

He estimated they could still repair a few dozen more TVs. Adding the 20 that hadn't been sold yet, they could bring in around 40,000 yuan in revenue.

In other words, from this batch of TVs, Fang Bai could make over 110,000 yuan in profit—a profit margin of about 1,000%. Extremely lucrative.

The next day, Fang Bai skipped school for the time being to handle business matters first.

He only went to school when the second period was about to end.

The moment he stepped through the classroom door, his classmates shot him strange looks.

Before he even sat down, Wang Dakai pointed at the exam paper on his desk and said enviously, "Boss, you're amazing—you got 83 on English."

"Is 83 that high?"

"It's awesome, okay? Top of the class! I only got 55."

"I only got 63." Zhang Xiao Ai, sitting in the front row, turned around, her eyes crinkling into two curved crescent moons as she asked Fang Bai for advice, "Fang Bai, how do you study English?"

Fang Bai let out an "oh"—so that was it.

Out of a full score of 100, his 83 was just average. The questions were pretty simple; it just meant the others hadn't done well.

The current-year students hadn't taken this monthly exam—they were still catching up on lessons. They couldn't beat the repeating students on mock exams yet; they'd 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 a lot of sentences. Every morning when I get up, after noon, and before bed, I review the words I've memorized.

That's what I do. It might not work for you."

"That's it?" Zhang Xiao Ai's eyes widened. It didn't seem like any special study method.

Fang Bai spread his hands. "Yeah, that's it. But how many people can stick with it?"

Zhang Xiao Ai asked again, "Hmm, I guess that's true. Do I have to memorize?"

"If you don't memorize English, what's the point of learning it? If you don't memorize, can you speak it?" Fang Bai shot back, then glanced at Big Guy.

When Wang Dakai saw Fang Bai looking at him, he quickly nodded. Whatever the boss said had to be right.

Zhang Xiao Ai, on the other hand, didn't seem to care. She said, "It's just for exams. You really think you'll use it?"

"I don't think so either," Zhang Xiao Ai's deskmate chimed in. A few nearby classmates, overhearing their discussion about English, leaned in to listen.

Fang Bai looked at the expressions of several classmates—they all seemed to agree with that view.

He couldn't blame them. They didn't understand the real situation, and even the English teacher might not get it.

He had to patiently explain, "International trade, translation, going abroad, communicating with foreigners—you definitely need English for that. I won't go into detail.

If you plan to go to grad school or do academic research in the future, you'll need to be really good at English. Otherwise, how will you write papers and get them published? Okay, that might sound a bit far off.

Let's talk about work. If you're doing scientific research, advanced technical materials are all in foreign languages. If you don't know English, who do you rely on? Professional translators might not understand specialized terms. The Oxford Dictionary has tens of thousands of words—who can remember that many?

There are plenty of places where English is needed, and plenty where it isn't. But if you learn it well, you'll have a wider range of choices..."

Fang Bai spoke slowly. In this era, without even a translation device, not knowing English made scientific research a real hassle.

He glanced at Big Guy, who was still nodding vigorously in agreement.

Fang Bai's words opened his classmates' eyes, earning him another measure of admiration.

"Fang Bai, you know so much. No one has ever told us this before."

"Yeah, the homeroom teacher never said anything either."

"The boss is the boss—it's normal for him to know more than us."

Wang Dakai thought being able to speak English was awesome, like those high-end characters in movies rattling off a few English lines—that would be simply amazing. That was his motivation to study.

As for the rest, he had none.

He felt there were two things about Fang Bai that earned his respect: his mysteriousness and his sincerity toward others.

Now he could add one more: good English!

As for the other classmates, their initial admiration for Fang Bai came from pity over his broken finger.

There was also a bit of respect for his eloquence—even the school's student council president wasn't as smooth-talking as him.

But as classes went on, Fang Bai often skipped lessons, making his classmates think he'd gone wild, that he wasn't really here to retake the exams but just going through the motions.

Now that Fang Bai's English was far better than theirs, everyone was a little surprised and looked up to him a bit more.

Fang Bai chatted for a while, then checked his English test paper. Seeing him seriously studying, the others stopped bothering him.

With grades that good and still working so hard, they had no excuse not to put in effort.

It was just that they usually didn't see his hard work.

On Fang Bai's test paper, the teacher had marked and corrected all the mistakes, so he didn't need to check the answer key to know where he'd gone wrong.

Third period: Chinese.

The teacher handed out the papers, still calling out scores before distributing them.

"Fang Bai, 92 points—not bad. Review the basics a bit more, and you can still improve a lot."

"Chen Yang, 72 points. Your essay was a complete mess."

[Chinese and Math: 120 points each; English, Physics, Chemistry, Politics: 100 points each; Biology: 70 points; Total: 710 points]

Fang Bai's Chinese was at the upper-middle level of the class. He was fairly satisfied with the score, since he hadn't really reviewed.

Looking over the paper, he'd gotten most of the reading comprehension right, but made quite a few mistakes on the basics—he hadn't even written the basic poetry lines correctly.

After Chinese, the afternoon brought Physics and Math. Fang Bai scored 65 and 100, still upper-middle in the class.

His classmates weren't surprised by his scores. The top Physics score in the grade was 80, and Math had a 112.

The next morning, the last subject—Chemistry—was handed out. Fang Bai scored 75.

Aside from English being good, his other subjects were all upper-middle: Politics 65, Biology 50.

But combined, it wasn't ordinary. The total came to 535 points, quite a bit higher than most students.

By third period, it was Homeroom Teacher Zhan Feng's class.

Over the past two days, all the subject teachers had been working overtime to grade the papers. Zhan Feng had gotten all the subject scores yesterday and only finished tallying them this morning.

After tallying, she compared each student's results with their college entrance exam scores.

Even though the test wasn't the same as the Gaokao, it still had significant reference value, since they used mock exams with similar difficulty.

Overall, most students hadn't changed much, though a few had improved noticeably.

And Fang Bai's improvement was the fastest—up by 55 points!

His total reached 535, ranking fifth in the class and fourteenth in the whole school.

Under normal circumstances, if Fang Bai could stay steady and improve a bit more, he had a shot at the key university cutoff next year.

The retake class wasn't short of students hitting the undergraduate line, but crossing the key line was extremely rare. Last year, only a few in the whole school made it.

Just over a dozen!

Among them, the retake class accounted for the vast majority of those crossing the key line, with only a handful of current-year students.

The school had six retake classes, totaling about four hundred students, while the current-year students numbered nearly a thousand.

Retake classes one, two, and three were elite classes, aiming for undergraduate and key universities; classes four, five, and six targeted decent vocational schools.

Zhan Feng walked into the classroom and noticed Fang Bai wasn't there.

Standing at the podium, she swept her gaze over the students below and said in a flat tone:

"Classmates, the scores are out. The school's highest is 565 points, from Class Two.

Our class's Wu Jian scored 553, ranking third in the school.

He missed the key university line by two points in this year's Gaokao—didn't perform well. I hope he keeps working hard!

Fifth in the class: Fang Bai, 535 points. A huge improvement—up 55 points from his Gaokao score, the biggest jump in the class. I'd like to give him a special mention here..."

The first four students' scores didn't surprise anyone—that was their usual output.

But Fang Bai's total genuinely shocked everyone.

Skipping class often and still improving that much—it was too outrageous!

There was no reason for it.