Every June, millions of Chinese high schoolers take a make-or-break university entrance exam that many regard as the world’s hardest.
The pressure is enormous. Students spend years studying everything from math to the sciences and philosophy for the “Gaokao.” A single score serves as a potential arbiter of a student’s future, determining not just whether they can attend college but also where they’ll go and what they’ll study.
Each year, the exam is a national event. To ensure students arrive at testing sites on time, police enforce rolling traffic closures. Construction projects are halted within a specific radius of test sites so students aren’t distracted.
All students must take Chinese language, math and foreign-language exams, plus three subjects determined by their chosen path of study. The content of the questions also varies by region. Here are some of the questions that appeared this year: