Chapter Eighteen: The Fallen Tiger

  The First Middle School, the best school in Xihaishi, has a golden eagle sculpture at the entrance that seems to be flying. The main office building is surrounded by dense woods, followed by rows of teacher dormitories, a spacious square, cultural wall, school newspaper display window and newly built teaching buildings. In 1998, the new teaching building of No. 1 Middle School was completed, with the main and auxiliary buildings connected by a corridor in the middle, which is a unique architectural form among schools at that time.

  The large teaching building and even the square in front of it were quiet, without the crowded scene just now. Only the isolation area pulled out by the red line made today's school unusual.

  The first bell rang, and countless classrooms fell silent. In one of these classrooms, Su Can sat inside, each person had a separate desk, with a white admission ticket number strip attached to the front of the desk, followed by two typical black-faced invigilators standing solemnly.

  Su Can was a bit of an away game, the test number on the admission ticket was all shuffled and reassigned. In this exam room, there were only four or five allies from his original class, while most of the others were local students from No. 1 Middle School. Fifteen minutes before the start of the exam, when they saw that they were all from San Zhong, they didn't take it seriously.

  As soon as the first bell rang, everyone stopped communicating. The invigilating teacher was also a local one, and most of the people on site knew each other, some were even their head teachers. It's just that Su Can and a few others looked unfamiliar, so they couldn't help but pay more attention to these three people.

  People often say that the words of a top school are intimidating, and because they have been stamped with an excellent brand, both students and teachers have a sense of superiority. The extreme form of this sense of superiority is to think that except for the first middle school, anyone else's quality problems cannot be compared to those of the first middle school. If cheating or eavesdropping incidents occur at the first middle school, it would be a shocking event that shakes the entire school, but if students from other schools cheat, it would be seen as nothing out of the ordinary.

  So the invigilator in Class One raised an eyebrow, and the students in Class Three became the focus of attention. In comparison, a few people who were usually more active in Class One actually relaxed a lot.

  Next to Su Chan was a girl wearing glasses, with two braids hanging down from her neck. She caught Su Chan's attention and looked like the typical good student type, but the thick lenses obscured her face. She wore a tight-fitting tank top, casual pants, and canvas shoes. Her skin was fair and delicate, and her figure was well-developed.

  Su Can couldn't help but let out a faint sigh, indeed having the capital to be proud of. Many local bureaucrats and middle-to-upper-class families sent their children to study at No. 1 Middle School. Not to mention whether the internal comparison of food, clothing, and daily necessities was serious or not, but rather that the students of No. 1 Middle School were generally dressed in a way that even he, as an outsider, didn't find too outdated. Many of them wore the first batch of famous brand-name trendy clothes that had flooded into the mainland at that time, which could be seen at a glance.

  "Hmm! Hmm! Hmph..." The invigilating teacher walked to Su Can's side and placed the distributed test paper on his desk, then knocked on the desktop with his joints, casting a somewhat dissatisfied glance at him.

  The woman next to him had excellent grades at First Middle School, and seeing Su Can, a candidate from Third Middle School, sizing up his opponent, naturally alerted the proctor.

  While handing out the test papers, he didn't forget to clear his throat a few times to draw back his attention, also representing that Su Can might be the next object of his attention.

  The woman next to him with thick glasses looked up and swept a glance at him, Su Can awkwardly returned a smile, spreading out the test paper in front of him, "Xia Hai City 1998 Junior High School Entrance Examination Mathematics Test Paper" title flashed before his eyes.

  It's finally here!

  Su Can roughly scanned the test paper, and then he was overjoyed. The math in middle school and high school have a fundamental difference. If middle school math is just basic, the difficulty is like riding an electric bike, while high school math is almost like flying a hang glider, with a huge gap between them. In his impression, the math test for junior high school entrance exam was very difficult that year, and many excellent students were struggling. But why did it seem so simple when he saw it himself?

  The difficulty of the math problems I reviewed a few days ago in junior high school is almost two levels different from now!

  The second bell rang, and the thin proctor raised his eyes, a cold glint sweeping across the room. "You may begin!"

  Writing with great speed can be used to describe the writing speed of an essay, but if it is applied to Su Can's current filling speed for the math test paper, it would be a bit extremely impossible.

  A thin invigilating teacher brought a newspaper, poked two holes in the eyes of the cover person's portrait, and opened the newspaper. Through the two holes, he scanned the outside situation at any time. For him, a normal exam was like an obstacle course, every question was like an obstacle on the road, who could run through the entire course within the limited time and step on fewer landmines to avoid being burned, only then could they emerge victorious in the end.

  He eagerly hopes to see many people frowning, especially the students of Sanzhong Middle School, in order to highlight the advantages of Yizhong Middle School. In such a large examination room with multiple schools mixed together, the best should also be students from Yizhong.

  However, the two invigilating teachers also found that this exam paper was a bit difficult. It is said to be the last question bank set by a teacher who is about to retire, and after finishing it, he even claimed that he wanted to "let students really distinguish their levels". As a result, several excellent students from No. 1 Middle School, whom they usually knew, were also trapped in deep thought trying to understand the questions.

  Among them was the glasses girl next to Su Can...

  Hmmm... doesn't seem quite right...

  The thin and tall invigilating teacher, Xiao Rihua, is the head teacher of a class in the first year of junior high school. He usually teaches mathematics as well. After glancing at the test questions, he knew that this set of test papers was quite difficult for students at this stage, even for those who were among the top 100 in their grade at No. 1 Middle School. Several students who were usually among the top 100 in their grade at No. 1 Middle School also encountered difficulties and struggled to solve the problems. The little boy from No. 3 Middle School, whom he had just reminded not to look around, was writing very fluently!

  Xiao Rihua blinked, indeed not wrong, Lu Yao Shun, Shen Lu, Yang Zhao and several students in the same grade who were known for their academic achievements, all furrowed their brows due to a few difficult questions, falling into repeated calculations. Xiao Rihua understood that although there was no top student from No. 1 High School on this exam site, those students could be considered as the advantageous forces in this examination room.

  Everyone was stuck, but that third middle school student who came over could sit down unimpeded, which is a bit exaggerated.

  "It's definitely impossible, let's skip it for now and come back later." Xiao Rihua smiled faintly in her heart, this wasn't a bad approach, it was the kind of teaching method those third-rate teachers at Third Middle School would use to help their students grasp the big picture.

  Xiao Rihu couldn't help but let out a chuckle.

  An hour and twenty minutes have passed, several people have finished writing and handed in their papers. The glasses girl next to Su Can also put down her pen, checked the machine-readable card, packed up, picked up her things, and walked out of the classroom with a proud and confident expression without looking at anyone around her.

  Su Can finally made a last check and stood up to hand in his paper five minutes after Glasses Girl left.

  He actually finished the entire college entrance exam in about 40 minutes, just ten minutes after the bell rang, and he couldn't believe that he had completed all the answers to the notoriously difficult questions on the exam paper, which had almost made him lose his mind during middle school!

  Su Can still couldn't believe everything in front of him, and he insisted on checking, filling, and doodling, drawing circles on the draft paper for a full 40 minutes.

  Finally handed in the paper with a nervous heart.

  Someone picked up 50 million and put it in his arms without hesitation, but he was still anxious and uneasy. This is Su Can's current state of mind.

  The first major hurdle in life was the exam, and math was the acknowledged roadblock, but it had passed so simply that he still couldn't quite believe it.

  Su Can walked out of the school gate in a daze, leaving the empty square of the First Middle School where only a few people were handing in their papers and leaving one after another.