Looks fishy! The Gaokao question that had many students baffled

Around 9.4 million Chinese students have just finished the exam that could possibly hold the highest stakes in their lives—the Gaokao, or National College Entrance Exam. How one fares in the exam could determine their education profile and probably job prospects in the future.

The grueling exam has long been labelled as one of the most notoriously tough exams in the world, and each year at this time, people just cannot stop making fun of the tricky questions that pop out from the two-day exam.

Over the past two days, it’s a grass carp fish that has baffled the whole country.

Gaokao covers four subjects: Chinese language and literature, math, foreign languages (English in most cases), and either science or the humanities.

Chinese language and literature, usually includes quick quiz questions, reading comprehension, and a long essay. This year, the Chinese exam held in east China’s Zhejiang Province selected a magazine article titled, “A Tasty Delicacy” for its reading comprehension portion, which tells a plain story of how a rural family feasted on a hard-won fish.

Now try and see if you can figure out answers to the questions.

1. Please interpret the title, “A Tasty Delicacy”

2. The article ends with the sentence, “The fish has died, only its eyes glimmering eerily.” Please appreciate and analyze the sentence.

The eerie glimmer has definitely vexed many of the worrying test takers, who swarmed to the Sina Weibo account of the article’s author, Gong Gaofeng, to demand an answer. To the surprise of all, the glimmer seems to be a mystery for Gong as well.

“Guys, please move on to your exam and don’t push me, the standard answer hasn’t come out yet, how should I know what I want to express? How should I know the meaning of the last sentence? I can only tell you, the fish jumped out of the pot just like this, glimmering eerily,” Gong said on his weibo account.

The witty response soon went viral, with the topic, “Gaokao reading baffles original writer,” garnering 62 million views on weibo as of Friday morning, and sparked a heated discussion.

“Uncle Gong, please arm yourself with a fish pot, or else you’ll see the eerily glimmering eyes of 290,000 examinees,” a weibo user named @yisongdepangci said.

 “I can’t stop myself from transforming into a stubborn fish,” another user named @xiaoxiaoxiaoxiaosheep joked.

 “Hi, Uncle Gong, how is your English? Have you written any English articles? I’m so scared that the eerie glimmer would reappear in the English reading comprehension portion,” @niyongyanwoyongxin said.

Despite all the jokes and fun, however, the author published another weibo post later to help justify the passage.

 “The article is just like a child, once my job is done, it will grow on its own, ‘The Tasty Delicacy’ is now eight or nine years old, and I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like, thus there is no problem with the teachers who set the questions to have their own comprehension…The Gaokao is a cruel game, once you’re in, you have to follow the rules.”

What’s your take on this fiendish exam question?