21: Chapter 21 Unstoppable Momentum

At nine in the morning, the bell for the Physics exam rang punctually.

Serving as a ghost gate for science students, the question-setting team for this joint exam's Physics paper had clearly shown no mercy.

The prompt stems were as long as short essays, with various new materials and scenarios emerging endlessly.

Jiang Lin filled in his name and examination number, then flipped straight to the final concluding big question of the paper.

The stem was very long, testing the motion of charged particles in a composite field; not only did it add the dual-cutting of an alternating electric field and the Lorentz force, but it even introduced a macro model with variable mass.

Anxious sighs soon rang out across the exam hall.

In another exam hall, Sun Ming was spinning his pen frantically; it would drop onto the desk after two spins, and he would pick it up and spin it again. The whole person was like an ant on a hot pan, and the sweat on his forehead had glued his bangs together.

He couldn't quite understand the charts and graphs of this question, let alone set up the equations.

Jiang Lin rested his chin on one hand, the gel pen in his hand gently spinning half a circle at his fingertips before dropping toward the test paper.

That was a digital game he played by building three-dimensional sandboxes in his mind every day during the last half year in the Wasteland when he was unable to do physical labor on the ground.

The frequency changes of the alternating electric field turned into frame-by-frame slow motion in his consciousness, and the spiral trajectory of the charged particles extended clearly in his mind like a glowing line.

He did not draw those tedious force analysis diagrams, but instead directly wrote down two extremely clean generalized expressions for the conservation of momentum and energy on the test paper.

After more than half an hour, Jiang Lin capped his pen, making a slight click.

He laid the test paper flat on the desk, crossed his arms over his chest, quietly looked at the gray sky outside the window, and began to close his eyes to rest his mind.

Compared to the smoothness of the morning's Physics exam, the afternoon's English exam gave Jiang Lin a completely different sense of strangeness.

At two-fifty, the sound test ended.

When that standard and sonorous dialogue between a man and a woman came through the English listening broadcast, Jiang Lin's hand holding the pen paused slightly.

"How much is the shirt? / Nine pounds fifteen pence."

This pure human recording, free of sandstorms and noise, fell into Jiang Lin's ears and indeed brought a trace of unfamiliar trance for the first two seconds.

On the Wasteland, when he recited English texts to combat extreme loneliness, he often roared them out at the top of his lungs, carrying a rugged wildness.

And now, the slow, greenhouse-flower-like standard broadcast tone in the broadcast created a slight dislocation from the pronunciation system in his memory.

But it was only dislocated for two seconds.

Jiang Lin's human supercomputer brain, tempered for nearly ten years, instantly activated its automatic error-correction mechanism.

Since his auditory nerves were somewhat rusty with the intonation, he would forcefully decode it using his massive vocabulary database.

As soon as every syllable in the broadcast landed, the massive English vocabulary database in his brain immediately completed precise matching.

The next twenty-nine minutes were not a test for Jiang Lin, but a torture of patience.

The speaking speed in the broadcast was too slow.

Relying on his massive vocabulary and perverted logical deduction, often as soon as the dialogue threw out a lead-in, he had already guessed the ending and what the question would ask.

But he still had to endure it patiently, sitting in his chair and waiting idly for that long piece of dialogue to finish broadcasting.

He simply stopped listening, instead using the dozen or so seconds of pause between each question to sweep his gaze like a scanner across the reading comprehension and cloze tests that followed.

Those long and difficult sentences were like building blocks with their skeletons taken apart in his eyes, as smooth as reading a Chinese instruction manual.

The third day.

The morning Chemistry exam felt like Jiang Lin was writing his own memoir as he took it.

Various chemical equilibria, redox reactions, and precipitation-dissolution equilibria were all survival skills he had repeatedly practiced in order to purify water quality and make fertilizer in extreme environments.

And the afternoon's Biology exam drew a fateful period to this mock exam.

The test papers were handed down, and Jiang Lin's gaze swept across the first page. The stem of one of the multiple-choice questions occupied a large space.

"When carrying out ecological restoration in an abandoned mining area with strong acidity and heavy metal pollution, researchers constructed a composite ecosystem of a certain hyperaccumulating legume-microorganism. The figure below shows the changes of ion carrier protein on the root cell membrane in this system, as well as the material and energy transfer relationship model with rhizobia. Based on this, analyze which of the following options is correct..."

Seeing this composite contextual question cloaked in the coat of cutting-edge science, the surrounding examinees were bitterly biting their pen shafts, but Jiang Lin couldn't help it, a helpless smile appearing at the corner of his mouth.

The question setter created a scene on paper, whereas he had built this ecosystem with his life on that truly heavy-metal-polluted, strongly acidic Wasteland wilderness.

He didn't need to nitpick and analyze any carrier protein conformation changes or feedback inhibition.

How did those twenty-five square meters of Soybean survive in the acid rain and barrenness of the Wasteland?

It was he who used plant ash to neutralize the acidity and preserved the activity of the underground rhizobia.

It was the heavy metal toxins that finally forced active transport on the cell membrane to a halt.

For him, this kind of question was just like asking an old carpenter how wood was planed flat.

He saw through the truest laws of life operation behind those complex biological terms.

Choose C, without any suspense.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, as the bell for submitting the final Biology exam resounded throughout Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, the three-day mock exam finally concluded.

A long-suppressed clamor erupted in the teaching building, but not much joy could be heard in this clamor; more of it were wails.

"It's over, it's over! I couldn't even do the first sub-question of the final big Physics problem this time, and that biology question about abandoned mining area restoration made everything go black before my eyes!"

Coming out of the exam room, he ran into Sun Ming. Sun Ming approached Jiang Lin with a crying face.

"Old Jiang, I feel like I'm going to have to pad two books on my backside when I go home tonight. My dad's Seven Wolves belt is definitely going to draw blood."

"It's not that exaggerated; everyone is finding it difficult, so the score line will naturally drop." Jiang Lin swept the stationery on his desk into his schoolbag and comforted him in a gentle tone.

...

Jiangcheng Municipal Education Bureau's joint exam online marking center.

Hundreds of computer screens emitted a dim blue light, and the sound of keyboard clicking was dense.

This city-wide mock exam adopted double-blind online grading, with all papers scanned into electronic versions, cut into different question blocks, and randomly distributed.

Grade 3 Class 4's head teacher and mathematics teacher, Old Liu (Liu Jianguo), was holding a vacuum flask steeped with strong tea, sitting in front of the computer and rubbing his sore brow.

He was responsible for the final concluding big question of the math paper, which was the derivative question that had stumped ninety percent of the examinees in the city.

"Those question setters are really ruthless; they even used implicit zero-point substitution, and wrapped it in the skin of the scaling method." Old Liu took a sip of bitter tea and sighed.

He had been grading for a whole afternoon.

The vast majority of students left this question completely blank.

Those who were slightly better could work out the differentiation of the first sub-question and get four points.

As for the second sub-question, so far, he hadn't seen a single one done correctly.

Even the top students of Jiangcheng Middle School often lost their way in the case-by-case discussion of the second step.

Old Liu perked up and clicked on the next slice scan.

An answer sheet with a very special handwriting appeared on the screen.

There were no fancy connected strokes; every number and letter was written extremely neatly, strong enough to pierce through the back of the paper.

Old Liu glanced at the problem-solving process, and his originally casual sitting posture instantly tensed up.

This examinee did not tediously construct two new auxiliary functions, but instead performed an extremely exquisite parameter separation directly in the first step.

The steps on the screen were pitifully few, totaling only five lines.

Yet it was these five lines of equations that easily crossed over that most error-prone implicit zero-point trap.

On the last line, a clean and neat parameter value range was steadily written there, identical to the standard answer without a single bit of difference.

Full score, 12 points.

As a mathematics teacher with twenty years of teaching experience, he knew all too well what this solution meant. The standard answer was for ordinary students to see; that was carpet-laying clumsy effort.

And this solution on the screen was true mathematical intuition.

"Old Li, Old Li, come over and take a look at this!" Old Liu couldn't help excitedly patting the teaching research group leader next to him who was grading multiple-choice questions.

The teaching research group leader leaned over, squinted his eyes to read it through, and also shook his head repeatedly, "Whoa, what a beautiful derivation! This dimensionality-reducing problem-solving approach was written by that grade top student from Jiangcheng Middle School, right? Although the steps are jumpy, all the key scoring points are hit spot-on, and not a single point can be deducted."

"It must be a top student from Jiangcheng Middle School; No. 7 High School can't possibly nurture such an immortal." Old Liu sighed with emotion while unhesitatingly typing a red 12 into the score box.

At the moment he pressed the enter key, a trace of strange familiarity suddenly flashed through Old Liu's mind.

That handwriting strong enough to pierce through the paper, he seemed to have seen it somewhere before.

But he immediately shook his head, casting this unrealistic thought out of his mind.