There has been some recent hoo-haa amongst Britain’s education fraternity over a report on the differing standards of mathematical competence between China and Britain.
Apparently this is a sample maths question from a university entrance exam in China:
And this is its British counterpart for first-year students already in the university:
So now you know how that mean studying cyborg in the form of your PRC classmate is produced and cloned 🙂 .
Actually to be fair, the China question hails from Singapore’s previous A-Level Maths trigonometry syllabus, while the British question hails from Singapore’s Secondary Two Maths syllabus. So Singapore is right up there amongst the high standard nations as well!
But in our ever-relentless pursuit to be Number One in everything, Miss Loi hopes she won’t see this one day:
Thanks to Ah Chew’s blog who first provided Miss Loi with the news!
14 Comments
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ok, it's official, you're siao...
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Mossie,
Don't try to change the subject.
If you can't answer the kindergarten question just say so!
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OMG! I've always suspected I would have had a really tough time in a S'pore Kindergarten!
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LB,
That's why you are in Pastaland and not S'pore.
So please, get out of my elite uncaring face!
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Found this page from Tomorrow.sg; I know the answer to part vi)!
42 =)
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Hai~Ren,
Wah you are so smart!!
But where's your working??! Minus marks!!!
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uhhh. actually i did that relativistic energy stuff last sem, and we're on to wave functions this sem. in a perfectly normal singaporean JC.
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haha..Special Relativity..
huang, does the new A lvl syllabus include energy-momentum invariance stuff?
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not as such because we're not expected to play around with linear algebra much.. for SR, syllabus mainly about lorentz transformations.
everyone's having fun with multivariable calculus now though haha. schrodinger's eqns..
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wow..the new A lvl syllabus seems hard =p
Those are typical stuff people learn in uni..haha
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huang & CKTalon,
We're constantly raising the bar, aren't we?
The day we see that kindergarten question may not be far off! 🙂
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what the mama?! O.O
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answer for part vi) of the kindergarten entrance exam is 42
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*skips the first 3 parts* T.T lotsa marks gone
iv)Since that there is no specification on what the time is, size of universe when time<0 is 0.00(correct to 3s.f.) as there are only energy, no mass
*sees the next part and realises that it is a give-away question
v)Since that the universe started with the big bang, which is a large amount of concentrated energy, the Universe came about when by luck, energy is concentrated in 1D (ie. a small dot) and expands!
XD