Although Ryan Carter in later years didn’t get into a top university, he reflected deeply during high school and didn’t fall too far behind in the end, entering a non-key major at a 211 university. So he still had a solid foundation. Not to mention, after years of working, traveling, and business trips abroad, his English was already second nature. Most of the junior high content focused on listening and the application of grammar in context, which was almost effortless for him. Except for some very rigid sentence structures and differences in colloquial expressions that took him a moment to adjust to, everything else was clear at a glance. What he was holding was actually last year’s Shanhai City junior high entrance exam paper issued by the school, and he wanted to see if there would be any issues answering it at his current level.

The result was that there were no problems. After comparing his answers, he lost ten points, mainly due to the use of some obscure grammar. Even if he didn’t know a few rare words, he could deduce their meaning by combining them with other words and the context. So for him, the only issue with English was to be a bit more careful, do a few more practice papers, and once he made up for the mistakes that had appeared, there would basically be no problem—getting a perfect score wouldn’t be difficult at all.

That really is a moving conclusion...

Chinese. After looking at a few papers, some rare characters or pronunciations tripped him up, such as “菡萏”, “毰毸”, “濩落”, “瀺灂”... These could be improved by targeting rare character test points. As for idiom usage and word usage, there were no issues. The biggest problem, surprisingly, was in classical Chinese and reading comprehension. Classical Chinese fill-in-the-blank questions required rote memorization—missing even one character was unacceptable. Ryan Carter lost a lot of points here, and to pick it up again, he could only increase his reading volume.

As for those reading comprehension questions based on prose analysis, those were what gave Ryan Carter a headache. It wasn’t about understanding or analyzing an article, but rather being asked what kind of connotation was reflected behind a described scene, what the author’s mindset was, what hopes or other bizarre associations were implied...

Ryan Carter remembered that a writer once said his own article was included in a Chinese exam, and when he tried to answer the questions himself, he got them all wrong—he didn’t even know what the “author’s mindset” was according to the standard answers. For these kinds of reading questions, the only strategy was the same as for classical Chinese: read more correct answers and then answer by rote—there was no room for free expression.

As for physics and chemistry, actually, these two subjects in junior high weren’t difficult. Physics was basically about applications related to everyday phenomena—mainly thermodynamics, resistance, voltage, current, and so on. The challenging parts of the questions were mostly centered around Ampère’s law, and problems involving changes in current and voltage with sliding rheostats. Chemistry tested chemical equations and the experimental process of chemical reactions. Some questions had small traps, mainly testing carefulness, but those were usually set by less skilled examiners. More advanced questions would integrate various types of reactions into the experimental questions, ranging from the displacement reaction in blast furnace ironmaking to additional reactions extending to using dilute sulfuric acid to remove rust.

Overall, these two subjects still depended on memorizing formulas and theorems. For Ryan Carter at this moment, picking them up again wasn’t hard.

As for math, he was a bit rusty on some formulas and theorems, but those could be made up for. At this stage, most math questions were within the syllabus, but some of the questions designed to differentiate top students were arguably beyond the syllabus. There was nothing to be done about that—this was how they distinguished the very best students. In fact, for the main syllabus questions in math, ignoring careless mistakes, many top students could almost get full marks. That’s when some questions were needed to widen the gap.

Some of these questions were even from math olympiads or content only taught in high school. What was being tested was how well some students had mastered the question bank. However, for Ryan Carter, he was least afraid of out-of-syllabus content. Although he had forgotten much of the math learned in high school, some things stuck in his memory, and by analogy, many things weren’t difficult for him. Of course, the premise was that he still needed to systematically review everything.

He also came across some very interesting math questions, such as this one: “To understand the health status of elderly people in a certain city, a random sample of elderly people is surveyed. Which of the following sampling methods is most appropriate: A. Select one hundred elderly women. B. Select one hundred elderly men. C. Select one hundred elderly people in a park. D. Select ten locations in urban and rural areas, and randomly select five elderly people from each.”

Although he might have gotten a bit carried away, some questions really did seem so easy to him now that even a child could answer them... And such questions really did appear on past junior high entrance exams.

As for ideology and politics, Ryan Carter had encountered quite a bit of this in later years, and now it seemed that a lot of it just needed to be reviewed and picked up again.

After going through a collection of past junior high entrance exam questions, he made a review plan.

English: Basically no need to review, just read some English readers every day, and if possible, look for some foreign newspapers to read.

Chinese: Plan to spend four days to thoroughly review the most important classical Chinese texts and the famous essays and prose in the textbooks.

Physics: Five days to review all the theorems.

Chemistry: Five days as well, to review the theorems, chemical equations, and reaction sets.