Chapter 20 The Nanny's Niece's Counterattack
This brings us to the timing of the competition, which is in just two weeks. It's much faster than the last physics competition, and to be honest, Lin Wei isn't really confident.
If she had two months to learn, she could say she was confident, but two weeks is too short; it feels like it would pass in the blink of an eye.
"Sigh, if only it could take a little longer," Lin Wei sighed inwardly, but no matter what, she still wanted to give it a try.
So, she immediately put aside all the classes. On the surface, she was listening attentively, but in reality, her mind had already entered the system space.
This approach completely abandons all other subjects, focusing solely on a math competition; it's almost like a case of "no success without madness."
However, she would come out every few tens of seconds to look at a question, and then go back in to think about it, so from the outside, nothing seemed amiss, and the teacher didn't notice anything unusual.
The only loss is that she'll have to study all over again for the next exam.
Three days later, she barely managed to finish the books she had bought, her mind filled with those competition problems. These few days felt even harder than the five days she had spent preparing for her midterms; they were truly mentally taxing.
However, there were a few questions that Lin Wei just couldn't figure out no matter how hard she tried. She gave herself no more than half a month for each question, which was only a few minutes in real time. If she couldn't figure it out after more than half a month, there was no point in wasting any more time.
But looking at the three books, thicker than bricks, covered with questions she had drawn, she still felt a sense of powerlessness.
"How can there be so many?" She stared blankly at the questions, feeling a bit overwhelmed.
She said there were only a few questions, but how could there actually be only a few? She didn't count, but there were definitely more than three hundred.
"Why don't I go ask Fang Yihuai?" she thought to herself, since he seemed to be more sensitive to mathematics. But she quickly dismissed the idea.
Aren't these questions too many and too simple? The fact that he asked her to buy these books means that he has read them all, and may even have done the questions in them.
Won't this make her seem too incompetent?
Because of her pride in being a top student, Lin Wei ultimately gave up on asking Fang Yihuai and decided to try her luck online to see if anyone knew the answers to these questions. If no one could answer them, she would then ask Fang Yihuai.
And just like that, she actually found someone online.
Almost as soon as the post was published, someone answered her question.
[The result obtained]: "This question is actually very simple. You need to approach it from this angle. The principles involved are not too difficult; they are junior high school knowledge. Of course, if you use high school knowledge to calculate the steps, it will be faster." He briefly explained how to solve this competition question using two methods. But to say it's simple wouldn't be an exaggeration; otherwise, Lin Wei wouldn't have been unable to figure it out for half a month.
She glanced at the solution he posted, and because of her solid foundation, she understood it immediately.
I see.
She had always rigidly followed a forward-thinking approach to problems, somewhat like brute force, without knowing how to use her brain to solve them in a more concise way. The result she obtained, though concise, directly addressed the confusion in her mind. Knowing where to begin, Lin Wei realized the problem wasn't so difficult after all.
She actually spent half a month thinking about this problem. Sure enough, this is the difference between having someone to guide you and not having anyone to guide you.
At this moment, Lin Wei felt incredibly strong. She looked away from her phone and confidently looked at the next problem in the book, intending to solve it just like she had understood the previous one. However, she discovered something: she still couldn't solve it. She knew she needed to change her approach; she couldn't solve competition problems like a regular math problem. But how easy was that? Before long, she shamelessly went back to ask the online friend how to solve the problem.
"Hey bro, how do I do this problem?"
Anyway, nobody knows her online, so she can ask whatever she wants.
[The Result of the Divination] Since he had time, he answered her question without hesitation. It was clear he was quite good at math; otherwise, he wouldn't have answered her question so quickly. Lin Wei glanced at the time; from the moment she sent the question to the moment he explained it to her, only two minutes had passed.
This was more surprising than anything else. Although she knew that whoever could answer her question was definitely intelligent, she never expected that she could so easily find a big shot online.
However, Lin Wei felt no jealousy at all. "Great boss, great boss!" This meant she could keep asking questions from now on.
To avoid scaring away this free tutor, she spent a long time praising him before cautiously revealing her true intentions: "Boss, can I ask you questions again in the future?" She sounded a bit like a naive newbie.
[The result of the divination]: "Okay." Probably because he felt she wasn't unpleasant, was studious, and quite intelligent, he readily agreed. "I don't have time during the day. If you have any questions you don't understand, send them to me, and I'll answer them for you tonight." At this point, he didn't know she had quite a few questions to ask.
Lin Wei smiled happily upon seeing this, "Okay, thank you, expert." Pretending to be a complete newbie didn't feel out of place at all. But wasn't she a newbie after all? She'd only been involved in math competitions for a few days.
As for feeling it's beneath her to call someone "boss" all the time? What a joke! What does the fact that there's no food in her lunchbox have to do with Lin Wei? Achieving her goal is the most important thing. Besides, he kindly taught her; what's wrong with calling him "boss"? She could call him "ancestor" if she wanted.
Because she was in a good mood, she didn't immediately immerse herself in studying. Instead, she browsed the website, saw some questions, and helped answer them. It was like she was taking a break after studying hard, but this relaxation was a little different from other people's relaxation.
Others relax by playing, but she relaxes by doing homework.
In just five minutes, she answered no fewer than ten questions, including the time it took to type. After she finished answering each question, the person who posted the question commented below, "Thank you so much, expert!" Several emojis expressed their excitement.
Because every question is not simple, Lin Wei doesn't really want to answer the ones that are too simple. Wouldn't that make her seem like a big shot to others?
However, she didn't know or notice that she would move on to the next question after sending out an answer, and she didn't see their comments when she left. A downside of this online learning platform was that comments weren't displayed in the backend; you could only see them by specifically clicking through the posts where the comments were posted. This meant that Lin Wei was completely unaware that while she was calling others "big shots," those she had helped were also calling her "big shot."
Tao Mengrui was one of the people she helped. She was a first-year physics graduate student this year. Not long after the start of the semester, her supervisor threw her into the research lab. She knew nothing about the subject, and her senior classmates were too busy to pay attention to her. She had just been severely scolded by her supervisor for a question, and in desperation, she posted for help online. She did find people, but they were all just nagging comments.
She wasn't saying she was only a freshman and couldn't answer the question; she was saying that even though she was a second-year graduate student in physics, the question was beyond her syllabus. In short, out of all these people, not a single one could answer her question.
Just as she was about to delete the post and go offline, she gave a wry smile, realizing she was desperate and grasping at straws. How could she possibly expect someone online, especially someone specializing in physics?
She glanced at it habitually, initially thinking it was another group throwing flowers, but she was stunned when she saw it.
"Your initial approach wasn't wrong, but you went astray from the middle onwards." This "No food in the lunchbox" pointed out two key points, both of which described her current predicament. Not only that, it also offered a solution, even if she didn't quite understand it yet, her intuition told her that the answer was correct.
Tao Mengrui is bad at everything, except for her exceptionally keen intuition.
"What kind of amazing person is this?" she asked, her expression showing some excitement.
This brings us to the physics competition a while back, and what Lin Wei learned. Although she learned it somewhat superficially, her deepest understanding was undoubtedly of micro-drones. Her mastery of mechanics and acceleration, optics, stealth principles, and so on far surpassed that of most people. Especially considering the various problems she had collected in her system space—she practically threw up from doing them all—how could she not solve a small problem?
Not only her, but Zhang Mo could do it too, so she didn't think the question was difficult or profound. She had no idea how shocked Tao Mengrui was when she clicked into her profile and saw that she was only a first-year high school student.
"Are all high school freshmen this amazing now?" She felt like she'd never actually gotten a master's degree. Regardless of the truth of those words, just being able to say something like that was enough to surpass the vast majority of undergraduates and graduate students.
Lin Wei was unaware of all this and didn't care. Back in reality, she resumed her studies. She discovered that some of the hundreds of problems could be solved using the problem-solving knowledge and methods she had just learned; they were all quite similar. Since she needed practice problems, those became her primary targets for experimentation.
A dozen minutes later, a smile appeared on her face. "Indeed, this method is much more convenient than my brute-force solution." For some problems, she did come up with a solution using that approach, but it still took a bit longer. If the time taken by the brute-force solution was measured in days, then the flexible approach was measured in hours.
Lin Wei knew why it still took her so long: she hadn't done enough practice problems and wasn't proficient enough. Her mental calculation speed was still very fast; if she could see the problem and immediately think of the next ten steps, solving problems would be much easier for her. At that moment, a crazy idea came to her: to use a large number of competition problems to build up experience and skill.
If you do enough problems, isn't it easy to do similar problems next time?
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