Singaporean students take the Pri Sch Leaving Exam in order to qualify for their preferred sec sch. It can be a high-stakes exam if parents are hell-bent on their young ones making it to prestigious junior high schs. Parents have been known to take sabbaticals in order to groom their offspring for this exam.
Our Maths exam, in particular, is notorious for causing young pupils to burst into tears upon leaving the exam hall. Is this a high-cortisol or low-stress question for you?
I have the solution. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to express the shaded area in terms of the semicircles and circles. We don’t have spoiler syntax here, do we?
Solution: https://gist.github.com/murchandamus/d1accb1188eb18b29e9496d2f27b5eab
Yay, I can graduate primary school! Thanks for the fun. (^_^)/
Heh, my wife looked at it for fifteen seconds and also had it. And her explanation was much simpler. Guess we can both go to middleschool now.
ur wife is thinking in the way we want our elementary schoolers to think!
is your wife a math teacher or engineer? lol
She’s in Finance. She solved it visually: I added her explanation to my gist above.
I feel so honoured tt u did ur working on GitHub haha
Heh, it seemed like the obvious place to publish a little bit of text without involuntarily revealing it to other people stumbling on this exercise.
This is for primary school?
Oh man the west is cooked.
we're cooked bruh
but the US is still the world’s largest economic power
The effects of bad education take 20+ years to show up fully
but as my wife loves to taunt, how come no Nobel Prize winners from Singapore yet?!!!
too busy using math to make money is why
It's crazy to me that this is considered for primary school. That's 5th grade, right?
sixth grade = 12-year-olds
this is actually not the most difficult sum.
quite ashamed to say this, but many students can solve this quite easily due to being hot-housed at tuition centres haha.
I will share more!
As someone who loves math, it makes me really sad about my own country
I heard @Undisciplined say tt high schoolers know neither reading nor simple arithmetic sums
It's not uncommon for jobs that only require a 3rd grade reading level to struggle to find enough qualified applicants to fill their openings.
This is crazy. When in the real world would someone use this outside of trying to design a unique shaped swimming pool?
I get these questions make you think but these poor kids who have to take this trauma of a test, not know if they answered it correctly and then if they don’t pass just feel like a total failure due to these types of questions.
learning how to think abstractly is actually very useful and carries to all areas of life
I agree. but it has degenerated to an arms race of who can afford the best tutors. I’m sure it’s same in the States too
in the end, students don’t particularly care about abstract thinking because they are overwhelmed with stress wrt whether they can pass
I agree with that 100%. I guess when I look back at when I had these types of test with no real teacher who helped teach us to think abstractly, it was painful. Most teachers just wanted us to know the answers and a straightforward way to solve things.
you just articulated the very gripe of every student and parent in Singapore
I thought this was fun, but only because there was no pressure of an exam. I could see how it would be quite stressful if timed and there's a grade behind it. Took me a minute or two to realize how to simplify the problem, but at that point it simplifies enough to do mental math for the solution.
ohhh I think fun is a great vantage point to start with. shall bear that in mind when guiding my own children haha