After failing the high school entrance exam, the disappointment of his own parents, and even the faces of those around him, were vivid in his mind. These memories, once sealed away, were now so clear, burning in Eric Bennett's heart. He no longer wanted to repeat the same mistake, to go through it all again. He was determined to change the sorrowful experience from eleven years ago and alter his own fate in this short period of time!

Eric Bennett skimmed through the Chinese and English materials. Many things that used to be familiar came flooding back to him. The Chinese essays required for recitation felt intimate and familiar to Eric Bennett; he could grasp their meaning at a glance. However, if he had to recite them word for word without missing a single character, he figured it would be impossible for him. So he proactively gave up on the recitation part. But when it came to word choice, sentence construction, even filling in short phrases by Lu Xun, essay analysis, and identifying the subject, predicate, object, attributive, adverbial, and complement in sentences—these were Eric Bennett's strengths, and he handled them with ease.

As for English, by 2009 it was no longer an obstacle for him. After all, his own company had foreign joint ventures, and Eric Bennett could handle listening and speaking without issue. The most crucial part of junior high English in 1998 was vocabulary accumulation and mastering some simple grammar. So, fortunately, these things were not difficult for Eric Bennett. Of course, he still needed to go through the entire vocabulary list to review and reinforce it.

This was still a time-consuming task. Except for a small number of words that required a glance to understand, even those words that seemed complex to junior high students, like congratulation (祝贺), delicious (美味的), were already as natural as daily language to Eric Bennett.

Flipping through the English book and seeing the test papers from his junior high days, looking at the total score of 150, and recalling his own bitter struggle always hovering around the passing line of eighty or ninety, Eric Bennett couldn't help but curse himself for being so stupid back in junior high! Looking at those mistakes now, it was obvious that they shouldn't have been made.

But then again, many of the mistakes at that time were due to a lack of deep understanding of sentences, and sometimes he couldn't even recognize certain words. This was a fundamental issue with vocabulary memorization.

In fact, the 1,500-word vocabulary required for junior high English had long been surpassed by Eric Bennett through his accumulation during high school, university, and even eleven years of work. So now, looking at those old test papers, he found the mistakes rather childish.

However, if he thought that just skimming through the material would be enough to handle the high school entrance exam, that would be taking the exam too lightly. At the very least, Eric Bennett believed that if he just let himself go into the exam like this, he might not fail to get into No. 3 Middle School, but the city's No. 1 High School or a provincial key high school would be out of reach.

Not many people get a second chance in life. Since he could start over, he couldn't just muddle through and face things blindly. Since the exam-oriented education system had already become a touchstone for success in this society—and would only become more intense in the future—and since he had suffered so much because of it, why couldn't he use the knowledge he gained later to his advantage and step on it?

For this reborn high school entrance exam, he was aiming for the top high school in the city!

Of course, now was not the time to just daydream—the most important thing was to take action.

A poor foundation had always been his biggest problem in the past. Now that he was alive again, he could turn all the experiences of his previous life into his own foundation. Now was the time to grow a vibrant, flourishing tree on this solid base.

He spread out the set of math practice papers copied from Ethan Foster. Eric Bennett understood that the most important thing now was to systematically grasp and become familiar with the three years of junior high knowledge that had already become blurry in his memory. Since this set of one hundred math problems was the most difficult collection of junior high math exercises, if he could work through all of them, then even facing the high school entrance exam would be a breeze.

Eric Bennett laid out six math books to the side, spread out the practice papers, and started with the first question. As expected, these problems, known as the most difficult of junior high, lived up to their reputation. The very first question stumped Eric Bennett. The main issue was the faded memory of mathematical concepts and forgetting some formulas, so Eric Bennett had to flip through the math books one by one to find them.

Night gradually deepened. His parents passed by the window several times, and seeing Eric Bennett buried in calculations, they smiled knowingly.

By eleven o'clock, Eric Bennett was working on the thirty-fifth question.

After several reminders from his parents, Eric Bennett told them to go to bed first. In the end, unable to persuade him, Grace Palmer and Richard Bennett, worried that their insistence would dampen Eric Bennett's enthusiasm for solving problems, returned to their room with a bit of concern.

During his student days, Eric Bennett had almost never stayed up late, but in his later work life, working overtime into the night became a regular thing, especially that kind of dull, maddeningly repetitive life. Compared to that, solving problems now was nothing. Moreover, as he solved one problem after another, Eric Bennett became more and more adept.

The review materials ranged from ""Monotonicity of Functions,"" ""Multiplication of Powers with the Same Base,"" to ""Quadratic Functions,"" ""Tangent and Cotangent,""…