Difficult questions

Feng Yun's test papers were internal materials from the textbook compilation team, but unlike the internal materials students chased after and prized, these papers were meant to test difficulty levels.

The college entrance examination had been reinstated only five years earlier, and no one, from top to bottom, knew what level of difficulty was appropriate. At first, the exam writers had unanimously agreed to keep things as simple as possible. By now, however, more and more students were receiving systematic instruction and spending long periods preparing, so that guiding principle no longer worked.

Thus, making the college entrance examination harder and raising the difficulty of teaching gradually became a shared understanding. But how much harder they should become required experimentation on all sides.

That was precisely why, from the mid-eighties onward, the college entrance examination alternated between easy and hard years. The exam writers were experimenting: if the average score was low one year, they made the next year's exam a little harder; if the average was high, they lowered the difficulty somewhat.

As a local textbook compilation team, Feng Yun and his colleagues had the job of guessing the exam writers' intentions and judging the difficulty and scope of the questions. At a more advanced level, they could even try to influence the exam writers. Since the people chosen to write the exam changed every year, an influential educational research institution could easily spend an entire year steering the direction of the questions.

Feng Yun's goals did not reach that far, but his textbook compilation team still needed to establish a range of difficulty before they could comfortably compile the relevant textbooks and exercises.

What Feng Yun had brought out now was a collection of test papers the team considered too difficult. Questions they thought were too hard to appear on the exam, but which were highly representative or demanded considerable thought, had all been gathered into these papers. This had originally been something they did in passing, but Feng Yun had brought them out to test Yang Rui.

Class monitor Liu Shan, the class's top students Li Xuegong and Xu Jing, and Huang Ren, who was also in the classroom, were all called over to take the test.

Of them all, Li Xuegong was the happiest. Before Yang Rui had "seen the light," he had been Xibao Middle School's academic star. He had few hobbies beyond finding questions and solving them. Now that fresh questions had been served up for free, he was practically a foodie standing before a feast, having to concentrate to keep himself from drooling on the paper.

His drooling lasted only a few minutes, however.

After looking through the entire math paper, Li Xuegong's mouth had gone dry.

What the hell were these questions?

The lines in the solid geometry problems were as tangled as a crowd of quadrilaterals performing a loyalty dance to Chairman Mao. The function graphs were as messy as leftover noodles. The trigonometry questions were either so long they inspired despair or so short he had no idea where to begin...

It took Li Xuegong half an hour just to finish the first four short questions, and he was not even sure whether his answers were right. As for the rest, he was truly exhausted in body and mind.

Solving questions was physically draining work, too.

Li Xuegong was utterly worn out, let alone Xu Jing and Huang Ren, whose foreheads had begun to bead with cold sweat. Class monitor Liu Shan appeared calmer, but her pen showed the same hesitation.

"Give me the next one." Yang Rui suddenly put down his pen and pushed his paper forward.

Everyone looked at Yang Rui in surprise.

"This paper has fewer questions than a regular one. I'll finish them all in one go so I won't have to come back for a second round." The first half of Yang Rui's remark sounded modest; the second half was the complete opposite.

Disbelieving, Liu Shan pulled his paper over and read through it question by question.

Feng Yun coughed, paced over to stand behind Liu Shan, and put on his reading glasses to look as well.

Ignoring them, Yang Rui got up, fetched the physics paper, and leisurely began working on it.

For Yang Rui, who had once been a star tutor, difficult questions were as routine as three meals a day. The little brats who attended tutoring classes outdid one another in bringing their teacher difficult questions. Once he dealt with one batch, a fresh crop of brats would report for duty.

Naturally, Yang Rui had not earned his reputation as a star tutor by being a pushover. As long as the questions were not the deliberately punishing sort found in math olympiads, he could solve them smoothly, without necessarily spending more time on them than on ordinary questions.

Feng Yun's papers were shortened versions, too, with only a dozen or so questions in total. Yang Rui worked at an unhurried pace and had finished every question by the thirty-minute mark.

The physics paper placed more emphasis on thinking and methods of solving problems, with less to write. Yang Rui worked faster and faster, almost feeling as though he could not stop.

The other students grew less and less willing to move their pens. They glanced this way and that, wanting nothing more than to stop.

At last, Feng Yun finished reading the math paper, let out a long breath, and said, "All right, you can stop..."

Li Xuegong felt as though he had been granted a pardon. Xu Jing stretched without restraint and cried, "That was suffocating!"

Scattered chuckles rose around them.

Zhao Dannian frowned, walked over to Feng Yun, and asked, "Old Feng, how many did he get right?"

Feng Yun handed him the math paper he had just read. "All of them."

When Zhao Dannian saw the questions, he, too, was secretly astonished. The difficulty of the assessment test and this one were worlds apart.

Zhao Dannian and Feng Yun looked at Yang Rui with strange expressions, while Liu Shan and the other students looked at him as though he were something strange.

"I just saw the light." Knowing what they wanted to ask, Yang Rui smiled and tidied up the scrap paper on his desk.

"Then what about those papers you published?" That was still what Feng Yun most wanted to ask.

Now it was Yang Rui's turn to be puzzled. "When did I publish any papers?"

Feng Yun hurriedly pulled a roll of newspapers from his briefcase and pointed to the outermost one. "Isn't this you, the Yang Rui from Xibao Middle School whose name is on this piece in the Middle School Student Herald?"

"Yes, that's me."

"Then why do you say you've never published a paper?"

"Do articles published in the Middle School Student Herald count as academic papers?" Yang Rui felt a little as though he had lost his bearings and inadvertently let that slip.

Naturally, Feng Yun was embarrassed by this remark. Yang Rui silently reproached himself as well. I was careless again. I need to watch my words even more when discussing things at night.

He had not actually said anything wrong.

Strictly speaking, the short articles Yang Rui had published really could not be called academic papers, only discussions of related topics. Different eras had different standards, however. Academic journals were pitifully scarce in the eighties, and many of the core journals of later years had not even been founded yet. In the eyes of Old Feng from the municipal education bureau, the nationwide Middle School Student Herald was already of quite a respectable standard.

Yang Rui himself, on the other hand, had merely noticed that it paid relatively well and submitted an article.

He had never imagined that an article about techniques for answering middle school math questions would bring an older official to his door.

After a long while, Feng Yun calmed down and slowly sat opposite Yang Rui. In a warm tone, he addressed the young man with thick eyebrows and large eyes. "How did you suddenly publish so many articles all at once? I counted them. There were more than twenty, weren't there?"

Yang Rui obligingly gave him an unassuming smile. "I didn't know how many would be accepted at the time."

He was telling the truth, though he left out the reason.

Feng Yun smiled. "A bit surprised?"

"A little."

"How did you write these articles? How did you choose the material? How did you put them together? It must have taken a lot of time." Feng Yun probed with one question after another. As he saw it, however clever Yang Rui was, he was still a high school student and would surely be unable to resist showing off.

Unfortunately, Yang Rui's mental age had long since exceeded that of a high school student. With the warning he had just given himself, he had only one answer to questions of this sort: "I saw the light."

Liu Shan burst out laughing.

Zhao Dannian coughed hard. "Why don't we talk about it tomorrow? It's far too late tonight."

With that, he pulled the reluctant Feng Yun away to share a bed for the night.

Before leaving, Zhao Dannian glanced around at the students cutting mimeograph stencils, only for Feng Yun to pull him away in turn.

By now, ordinary students' families had enough food and clothing, but it was still impossible to ensure that everyone who wanted an education could get one.

If the students could earn a little extra income and ease their burdens, fewer of them would give up their studies.

Feng Yun did not know how Yang Rui managed to sell five hundred test papers a day, nor did he want himself or Zhao Dannian to know. That was the cardinal rule by which a veteran of political campaigns kept his political life healthy.