Chapter 370: Controlled Li’s School (10,000-word update for monthly votes)_2
The instructors looked at each other, and the biology instructor whispered, “Could this kid have come prepared?”
“I don’t believe he can score perfect marks on all of them!” the math instructor said through clenched teeth.
“But there’s a trap here, maybe he peeked at the papers we issued before and memorized the answers, intentionally coming here to disgust us,” the biology instructor said, “So we shouldn’t test him with old papers. Don’t all of you have some killer questions up your sleeves?”
The others caught on: “You’re really thoughtful, let’s use a new paper to prevent him from having seen the questions.”
At this moment, Mountain Chief Li Liheng was the most relaxed one. He taught politics and history, and this dispute among the new and old instructors didn’t affect him at all.
But for some reason, as he looked at Qing Chen’s expression, he suddenly felt that the young man possessed an unrivaled confidence, although he didn’t know where Qing Chen’s confidence came from.
The group stopped wasting words—instructors in math, physics, chemistry, and biology each took out a paper and placed it in front of Qing Chen with feigned generosity: “We aren’t putting a time limit on you. Just do them as long as you can.”
Qing Chen glanced at them: “Do you need a lot of time to do these kinds of questions?”
This sentence nearly drove the four instructors mad. Wasn’t this guy just way too pretentious?!
However, when Qing Chen began writing the first chemistry paper, the chemistry instructor’s face had already changed.
As the saying goes, an expert is recognized as soon as they make their move.
The chemistry instructor had worked at Li’s School for 20 years and could judge whether a student knew their stuff just by glancing at the way they wrote their papers.
Not to mention that Qing Chen was now completing the paper as smoothly as flowing clouds and water, as if he could come up with the answers without thinking.
A paper would normally take a student of the school at least 90 minutes, yet Qing Chen finished it all in 15 minutes.
Qing Chen handed the paper to the chemistry instructor: “Grade it, and don’t arbitrarily dock points. We’re all experts here.”
What the hell, expert! The chemistry instructor said, annoyed, “I’m not so shameless. I’ll give you however many points you deserve!”
Qing Chen was indifferent: “Next.”
He then successively completed the physics, biology, and math papers, and even then, not even an hour had passed.
Qing Chen waited aside for them to grade the papers.
The chemistry instructor slowly looked up: “Done grading. 145 points.”
The physics instructor followed suit: “I’m done too, 145 points.”
The biology instructor: “145 points…”
The math instructor stared blankly at the graded paper before him with a choice question left blank, and said with difficulty, “145 points.”
If he had simply scored full marks on everything, it would have been one thing, but Qing Chen strictly controlled each subject at 145 points, as if responding to their earlier statement, “145 points is enough, save us the embarrassment of saying we’re being too hard on you.”
Still, such mockery couldn’t be made without some real ability.
Not far away, Mountain Chief Li Liheng was stunned for a moment. As he looked at Qing Chen, he thought to himself how good the kid was at mockery and wondered who he had learned such a disgusting spirit from, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu.
After finishing the papers, Qing Chen didn’t look up but instead took a blank piece of paper and wrote down a math competition problem for the math instructor.
Then he calmly watched him.
On the paper was written a problem: A member of the Contraindicated courts was playing a game with an invisible Taboo on a Euclidean plane, the starting position of the Taboo known…
It was a question from the 2017 IMO math competition, known as the “Magical Magic Invisibility Rabbit.”
At the time, the Chinese team was wiped out on this question, all scoring zero points, and it was considered one of the hardest questions in the history of the IMO math competitions.
To prevent recognition, Qing Chen had deliberately changed it to a member of the Contraindicated courts and a Taboo.
As the math instructor watched Qing Chen write down this question, his brow furrowed and sweat began to form on his forehead.
After nearly fifteen minutes, he didn’t even know where to begin solving it.
Eventually, the math instructor looked at Qing Chen: “Can you solve it?”
Qing Chen said calmly: “There are two core concepts in solving this problem: the first is the cycle length N, and the second is the maximum directional deviation angle.”
As he spoke, he wrote down the solution process on the white paper and handed it to the math instructor: “Grab a chair for yourself and head to the corner.”
Actually, the first time Qing Chen tried this question, he almost couldn’t solve it either.
But a prodigy is a prodigy.
The math instructor, clutching the corners of the calculation paper, nearly tore the paper, but having agreed to the wager, he could only obediently carry his chair to the corner.
Before long, however, he was staring blankly at the calculation paper.
For someone in the math teaching profession, the ingenuity of the question design, and the cleverness of the solving strategy, was enough to leave him entranced.
Then, Qing Chen looked at the physics instructor and jotted down his modified competition question: In a mercury trough, a glass tube was inserted vertically…
This time, the physics instructor too began sweating bullets.
Though they had been in basic education for a decade or two decades, facing competition problems felt like getting hung from a tree and pummeled.
The instructors were even at a loss for a while, unable to figure out which approach to solving to start with!
It wasn’t that their academic skills weren’t refined or their professional abilities weren’t strong, but rather that competition problems and foundational problems were products of two different thought processes, with different objectives for the ones setting them.
For biology and chemistry, Qing Chen opted for a rapid-fire Q&A method, spitting out more than a hundred true or false questions without thinking until the two instructors couldn’t answer anymore.