Sometimes what makes an exam tough is
not just the questions on the paper but how many other students you are competing against. The exam that Chinese students take to gain
entrance into university was last year sat by over 10 million students. That exam is
known as the gaokao and it's a huge deal. Students spend years preparing for the exam, often
with very intense study schedules and hours of extra coaching outside of school. The exam is
sat once per year in june and that day is taken very seriously. Traffic is diverted away from exam
halls and police patrol to keep the streets quiet. There are ambulances waiting outside just
in case of a nervous collapse. Parents will gather to pick up their children afterwards with
flowers to celebrate the fact that it's over. It is such high stakes because the exam
will give students a three-digit number which will often be the sole determinant
of their acceptance into university. The prestigious tier one universities are highly
sought after as they may offer greater employment opportunities once graduated but their acceptance
rate may be as low as 1 in 50 000 students. For many students doing well on the
gaokao may be a ticket to a better life. I have a copy of the 2020 exam here
and i'll go through a few of the questions just to show you what it is like.
The exam consists of compulsory sections on Chinese, math and a foreign language often
english and electives from physics, chemistry, biology or history, geography or politics,
and it takes nine hours over a couple of days. Some of the most notorious
questions are the essays and i've translated a few of them here. This one
is pretty relevant and it's all about coronavirus. They say that in the face of the outbreak they
have adopted prevention and control measures, that people are staying at home, venues
are closed and there is a safe one metre between people. They talk about the role of
volunteers, medical experts, workers and teachers and even journalists in fighting the virus.
Then the question says please synthesize the above materials and write an article
with the theme of distance and connection in the epidemic and they are to write an
essay of at least 800 words on this topic. It seems that current affairs or current
politics are often essay questions but so are some poetic and more unusual
sounding ideas. This one for example was so lovely even after passing through Google
Translate that I wanted to share it with you. People use their eyes to see others and the
world but they cannot directly see themselves as a whole. Therefore in the journey of life we need
to look for all kinds of mirrors, constantly draw self-portraits to examine ourselves and try to
answer what kind of person am I? What kind of life do I want to live? and what can I do" How to live
more meaningfully? and other important issues. The question asks you to write an essay as if
you are writing a letter to freshmen who are about to enrol in the first year of high school
on this theme of being able to perceive yourself. Challenging but a pretty interesting one. Since this is a physics and maths channel I'll
also take a look at those questions. This is one of the 2020 math papers in Chinese even
just from looking at the symbols and pictures you might be able to tell there are quite a few
word problems as well as a lot of geometry, logic, a little bit of calculus, some complex
numbers and some probability and statistics. I google translated question 5 to see that it says "if the circle passing the point 2,1
is tangent to the two coordinate axes the distance from the center of the circle
to the straight line 2x-y-3=0 is what?" This is my interpretation of what that looks
like. A circle that passes through the point 2,1 and for which both the axes are tangent. We want
to find the distance from the center of the circle which would be at 1,1 to this straight line and
we'll take that to mean the shortest distance which will meet the line at a perpendicular angle. We'll want to find the equation of this line and
to do that we'll use the formula y-y1=m(x-x1). m or the gradient of this line will be the
opposite reciprocal of the line that we already know and that gradient is 2 so
the gradient of our line will be -1/2. Substituting ones for y1 and x1 will
get the equation to be y=-1/2*x+3/2. The line we already know
could be rewritten as y=2x-3 so we can set these two equations equal
to each other. Doing that will give us the point where they intersect, those
coordinates are x equals 9/5 and y equals 3/5. Now we just want to find the distance between
these two known points to do that we will use the distance formula which is the square root
of x2 minus x1 squared plus y2 minus y1 squared. Putting our coordinates into there and
doing a bit of rearranging. We would find that the correct answer
is B, two root five over five. I think that the math involved here is reasonable
to expect on entrance exams in a lot of countries there are quite a few steps to this
one though so it's a little tricky but I think it's worth remembering that this
exam is not so much a certification or a test that you have learned what you've been taught
at school, instead this is a ranking system. It doesn't really matter that you know how to
do all the math steps to solve this problem and you pull it all off without making a mistake
it matters that you can get through the entire exam making as few mistakes as possible in
order to rank high among the other students. It doesn't really matter how much you know it
matters how much everyone else knows as well. Moving on to physics this is the 2020 Beijing
paper and the whole thing has been google translated. There is a bit of atomic physics
on the first page, thermodynamics, waves, some electromagnetism including number eight where
they've got a picture of a small magnetic needle hanging near a negatively charged rubber disk. The
disk rotates at high speed around the central axis and the small magnetic needle deflects. You're
then asked to determine what's going on. There's electronics, a question
about molecular forces, friction and one about the
conservation of momentum and energy. Question 14 is asking about a basketball that is
dropped from a height but is given a bit of spin and instead of falling straight down it
deviates from the vertical and moves in a curve. The second part of this physics exam seems to
be more about some experimental techniques. There are some classic questions about
experimental design and following the scientific method. The first section was multi-choice
but this section requires written answers. There are 20 questions in here but a lot of them
have multiple parts and some are pretty lengthy, for this physics paper I've shown you would get 90
minutes so it is still a race against the clock. In conclusion as one would
expect this is a difficult exam but I don't think that learning the content matter
is really that far out of reach for most students, in fact it is really dealing with the insane
competitiveness that comes with trying to get all these points without making mistakes because even
a tiny mistake could see your ranking plummet. Best wishes for anyone who is perhaps
preparing for this exam or an exam like it coming up in 2021, one day I hope you too
will be able to look at exams just for fun. I do have a whole series looking at exams
across the world so check out some of those videos in the playlist at the end. Thanks as
always to my Patreon supporters for making these videos possible including a special
shout out to today's Patron cats of the day Strega and Luna. Thanks for watching
and I hope to see you next time.
