Taboo

The maths paper was very unconventional. although it wasn't overwhelmingly difficult (by NJ standards, which isn't actually saying a lot), the questions were often presented in ways that we've never seen before, which promises to cause many careless errors due to panic and anxiousness :/ here's the first question, which is actually a personal favourite:

The sum of the digits in a three-digit number is 15. Reversing the digits in that number decreases its value by 594. Also, the sum of the tenth digit and four times the unit digit is five more than the hundredth digit. Find the number.

haha, i get such a primary school vibe from this question XD when i first saw it my jaw literally dropped for a while and i wondered if i had taken the JH1 paper by mistake. but of course, "guess and check" is no longer a viable method for questions like this when you enter JC. by the way, the answer is 852, which is the bus that mr teo takes home from NJ >.> i guess it's quite obvious who set it?

i wish things went as well with the chem paper. it seems that besides maths and physics, time management is a major problem that i have. we're supposed to choose 4 questions out of 5, but i only managed to do 3.5, which means that i can kiss 10 marks out of 80 goodbye right here and now T_T it's really frustrating to know that you just need 5 more minutes to get those marks, especially with such a giveaway question. for the first time ever, it was a zeroth order graph! that's just a straight line! D:

oh well, all that is now in the past. the important thing now is to focus on the future: one more maths paper and two more chem papers. then again, there's also econs and physics which are still not officially over. and H3 MATHS TOO.

i've been thinking about jokes that play on various stereotypes: racial, sexual, religious etc. are they really as bad as we denounce them to be? compare such a joke with a caricature: in both cases, a few humourous aspects are picked out and exaggerated for laughs, except a caricature is aimed at a single person while a discriminatory joke is aimed at an entire group of people. personally, when i hear a joke like that, i find it funny for the same reason i find things like spongebob squarepants funny: you take a simple concept and stretch it, then you apply it to daily scenarios for humourous effect. in other words, stereotype jokes are funny because the stereotypes portrayed are absurd and unbelievable. isn't it actually a good thing that stereotypes are being ridiculed and discredited as truths?

i shall end off with this sexist (kind of?) but hilarious webcomic:

edit @ 12.05am: some food for thought: