I'm Really a Superstar
chapter-625

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Evening, 8 PM.

Chenchen put down her pencil and held her workbook, then said, “Zhang Ye, I’ve finished my homework. I want to watch TV.”

Zhang Ye, who had been browsing Weibo all this while with a smile on his face, looked over when he heard her voice. He said, “Did you really finish your homework? Alright then, go and watch for a while.”

Chenchen grabbed the remote control and then went to turn on the television and sat down on the sofa. She switched channels until she found the channel airing a recent, popular local cartoon and sat there watching expressionlessly. This cartoon was not about some big bad wolf or little white bunny type of child-oriented cartoon. It was one that was targeted more at male teenagers and even men in their twenties. Because the premise of the cartoon was about wuxia, there were fighting and romance spun into it. So even for someone at Zhang Ye’s age, if he wasn’t too picky about it, he could watch it if he wanted to give it a try.

“Zhang Ye.”

“What now?”

“The new episode has finished airing.”

“Then that’s all you get to watch today.”

“I want to watch it from the start. Help me to do that.”

“Do it yourself.”

“I don’t know how, Zhang Ye. Do it for me.”

Zhang Ye could not take the nagging and forced himself to get out of bed to take the remote control to play back the episode from the beginning. Task completed.

Chenchen started watching her cartoon and did not bother Zhang Ye anymore.

Zhang Ye was happy and continued to nonchalantly interact with the netizens on Weibo. In a short period of time, those questions of his had also gone viral like the wondrous math problem from the afternoon. More and more Weibo users had gathered wave after wave to try the question, not believing that they could not solve it, vowing that they had to do so to differentiate their IQs from the primary school students.

“I’m here!”

“How many more minutes are there?”

“There’s still about five minutes left, hurry up!”

“I’ve solved one of the questions, but I don’t know if it’s the right answer.”

“Hurry, hurry, hurry, we’re almost out of time! Everyone, don’t give up, let’s draw on the wisdom of the masses and try together. If not, we can just copy that Peking University math teacher’s answer, but we must not let Zhang Ye have the last laugh!”

“Agreed!”

“Brothers and sisters, let’s attack!”

“Slay Teacher Zhang!”

Zhang Ye thought that this was really fun, and on top of that, his objectives were also met. He had started “Zhang Ye’s Classroom,” first, due to everyone’s request. Second, for fun. Third, it was because Zhang Ye noticed the situation was just right, so he used this chance to increase his popularity as well. He took every opportunity he saw that could help him increase his popularity as a celebrity. After all you could never have enough and there was really no need to nitpick on how to get more.

He had already risen up to B-list celebrity now, but to put it plainly, he was just the last place celebrity in the B-list rankings, the weakest one of all. Together with the person chasing him, Central TV’s Spring Festival Gala host Chen Ye—who was in the top spot of the C-list ranking, still eyeing to get his position back with a lot of news and updates—, it showed that he was not letting Zhang Ye have it easy. And so, Zhang Ye’s online math class this time would definitely play an important role in helping him pull away from Chen Ye in the popularity rankings. He had to firmly grab hold of his position in the B-list celebrity rankings.

In this world, the Celebrity Rankings Index was an aggregation of data from many outlets, like the search rankings of a celebrity on various websites, number of Weibo followers, number of screen appearances, comments, and reviews of works, etc. Combining all those data, a popularity score would be derived and thus rank the celebrities accordingly. Whether it was really an objective way of collecting data, Zhang Ye did not know, but he knew that the people of this world all depended and watched this Celebrity Rankings Index very closely and recognized it as the authoritative aggregator. As for why each tier of celebrity rankings had limited spots in them, Zhang Ye had already read up on the explanation given by the official website which said that people follow a limited number of public figures, as each person’s attention span was limited. For example, Xiaoming might like 20 celebrities, and to him, they all had a different ranking, some higher, others lower, some that he liked more than the others and also some that he would soon forget about. This was what was meant by a person’s attention span was limited. So when he suddenly notices and likes a new celebrity, then the celebrity that was ranked last in his mind would probably be forgotten. Unless there were some new works or news about them, Xiaoming was unlikely to ever pay attention to them anymore.

The people’s attention span was limited, there was only so much of the pie that celebrities could get.

—This was the official reason why the spots in the Celebrity Rankings Index were limited.

Of course, if the market expanded in the future, be it due to rural urbanization, a rise in living standards, or increased spiritual fulfillment of people—leading to an increase of people who used to be unconcerned with celebrities from the entertainment circle becoming concerned—then the pie would become bigger as well. When that happened, the authorities would also take it into consideration and update the design of the Celebrity Rankings Index. They would likely increase the number of spots available in each tier accordingly. However, such occurrences were rare, not even likely to happen once in two years, so it was pointless to depend on such events. Rather, it was safe to depend on yourself. Zhang Ye understood very clearly his plan and knew that it was a priority for him to stabilize his popularity score at this moment. As long as he could do that, then he could consider his next step to chase after the other big shots in the B-list. Otherwise, all that he had done so far would be for naught. But looking at the current situation, it seemed that the effects were far-reaching and had even over-fulfilled his objective.

It was time, the deadline was over.

It was time to announce the answers.

Zhang Ye posted on Weibo: “OK, question time is over. Those who have not submitted their answers yet, you have one more minute to do so.”

“It’s already been an hour?”

“Ah!”

“Wait, wait, wait!”

“I’m almost done!”

“Just wait for a while more! Let me do a few more calculations!”

Zhang Ye’s colleague—the Peking University math teacher—also submitted his answer at the last moment. Suddenly, countless netizens went to look and copy his answers and used it as their own.

When Zhang Ye saw this, he dismissed it with a laugh. Then he began to give out the answers to the question one by one. Of course, he had to also include the explanation and solving process, as all these questions he had set were very tricky. If he did not do that and just gave an answer, the people who could not understand would not know why it would be the correct answer. They would not take it just like that, so Zhang Ye would have to help them to the end by giving the answer along with explanation.

The first question…

The second question…

The third question…

One by one the answers were revealed!

After everyone saw them, they fell over like ninepins!

“Pfft!”

“Oh god!”

“So that’s how it is!”

“It really turned out to be elementary math problems?”

“The question that needed us to count the closed loops has left me kneeling!”

“Damn, how could this question turn out to be so simple? I even f**king thought it has to do with permutations and combinations! What a rip-off! Teacher Zhang, you’re really too much of a rip-off!”

“…”

“I finally understand why Teacher Zhang has made so many enemies! Teacher Zhang, if you keep scamming people this way, you won’t be left with any friends soon! I’m gonna cry!”

“F**k! All the questions are such scams! They’re all so deceptive!”

When they saw the questions an hour ago, they were already cursing at their mothers, but when they saw the answers now and realized it was so simple, they felt even more aggrieved. They started throwing a tantrum as one by one everyone started cursing at Zhang Ye hoping that he would get constipation or step on a banana peel and slip! How on earth did he come up with so many extremely wondrous questions!?

“Who got them right?”

“Let’s see who got them right.”

“I got them wrong.”

“I got them wrong too.”

“The questions are really not difficult, but it was really too tricky!”

Many of those who had copied the Peking University math teacher’s answer had realized now that he had also gotten one of his answers wrong. It was the answer for the second question that asked to explain the pattern that the numbers were separated by.

1, 3, 7, 8—1st tone.

10—2nd tone.

5, 9—3rd tone.

2, 4, 6—4th tone.

This was a question that combined the testing of language and math!

The netizens were utterly defeated.

“Even a Peking University math teacher could not get them all right?”

“We were totally defeated with no survivors?”

“It really seems like no one got them all right at all!”

“We were really wiped out? Oh my god!”

Those Peking University Math Department scholars were also downed. None of them got all four questions correct. The most they had were three questions correct.

Yao Jiancai said: “I think it’s better that I just go to bed. When the answers were released, I realized that I could not even understand what two of the questions were asking when faced with the answers!”

Peking University’s Su Na: “I didn’t even get one…”

Big Saber Bro was the same. Fan Yingyun had only gotten one question correct. Zhang Ye knew about Big Saber Bro’s math standard. As a world-renowned hacker and someone who was proficient in programming and code cracking, her math standards shouldn’t be bad at all. With things like 010101, they often deal with binary, however having a good standard in math did not mean that they would be good at math problems. When it came to answering math questions, what was most important was the way they interpreted the question.

This was an outcome that Zhang Ye had predicted. The first question had already filtered out 90% of the people who took part, the second question continued to attack them, while those who could do the third question were already considered non-existent. Back in Zhang Ye’s previous world, when people saw these questions, they would be able to answer them almost immediately. But that was because most of those people had already seen the answers before, or had encountered the questions before, so they knew the trick to answering them. As such, a small group of people could solve the questions. However, it was different in this world. Everyone’s learning and mindset of testing over here were all considerably more traditional and rigid. They had never encountered such questions before, so they did not have the fundamentals or flexibility of thought to deal with them. Being wholly wiped out this way was not an unexpected outcome at all.

The people were utterly defeated!

Zhang Ye took home a flawless victory.

The Peking University math teacher stood forward to humbly say: “When I saw these questions, together with this afternoon’s question, I suddenly broke out in a cold sweat and couldn’t help but think about something. It’s lucky that the primary school test, secondary school exams, or even the national college entrance exams did not have Professor Zhang Ye taking part in the setting of papers. If that were the case, then without a doubt, it would be a total nightmare for those test and exam candidates!”

“That’s right!”

“Damn, I’m taking my national college entrance exam this year, please don’t scare me like that!”

“Surely that won’t happen, right? Please don’t ever look for Zhang Ye to set the exam papers! If this person set a paper, then the straight-A students from Peking University and Tsinghua University might not get more than 20 points. They might even end up with 0!”

The netizens were also shocked by this. Many of them were students. If someday they faced such questions in their exams, then it would really be unimaginable. And besides, not to forget that Zhang Ye had only posed these elementary math problems, if he really set a few junior high, high school, or university level questions, then wouldn’t that make everyone unable to do anything? Who would dare thump their chests and say for sure that they could answer Zhang Ye’s questions?

No one would dare do that!

Look at how the Peking University math teacher was left genuflecting in the face of these questions!

On Weibo, an authoritative person in the field of education was also attracted by these elementary math problems. He appeared and said: “After the answers to these questions were revealed, it showed that they were really not difficult at all in the first place, but the people who could really answer them correctly were just too few and far between! Zhang Ye’s brain is truly a treasure of the mathematics world. These exciting and wondrous questions have also taught the education world something today. I have a feeling that in future exams and tests, we might be headed towards this new direction of development. In the past, our tests and exams were too corrupt and obsoletely structured. They’re no longer able to keep up with the times. But Zhang Ye has now shown us a new direction that we could head towards!”