Well, just thought I would start an occasional series on notoriously challenging Maths problems that appeared in Singapore’s Primary School Leaving Examination. It’s a dog-eat-dog world in our educational system. Some questions are so tough that children come out of the exam room, whimpering. Their parents subsequently cry foul, attracting intense media scrutiny for a week or so. Hard to imagine how such questions corral the attention of the entire nation, huh.

Anyway, some of these problems plagued me during my childhood. High time for me to learn how to solve them so that I can train my son to beat the system. Will like to thank @south_korea_ln for demolishing my inertia with his Daily Maths puzzle; otherwise I doubt that I would have the discipline to research these questions.

This question appeared in the 2023 Maths paper.

Figure 1 shows a trapezium which has a perimeter of 96 cm. Jiayu joins three such trapeziums to form Figure 2 which has a perimeter of 204 cm.