UNLESS YOU have a little one who did the exam and whose future as either a college professor or a cocaine addict might have been determined last Tuesday, you’ve probably forgotten the stress of the Secondary Schools Entrance Examination (the 11-Plus); I propose to remind you of it by attempting last year’s actual paper over three Mondays, starting today, with the maths.
Question 1. ADD 346 + 412. The first question is easy, so even dunces can work it out in an hour, but must they point out the child has Attention Deficit Disorder?
Question 2. SUBTRACT 759 – 356. Oho, I see now, that was “add” in capitals. Still, far too easy a question for a middleaged man with a calculator on his computer desktop. Skip ahead to harder ones.
Question 26. Divide 3/2 plus 5/6. Hmmm. My poor arithmetic is shaming my Potogee shopkeeper ancestors, all of whom could add vast numbers in their heads instantly, once the figures were preceded by a dollar sign. Would question 26 be less incomprehensible in words: Divide three-over-two plus five-over-six? Nope, still closer to Greek than maths to me. Skip on to the written maths questions, where I have at least a chance of working out the English of the maths.
Question 31. Of 150 children at a summer camp, 30 wear glasses. What percentage wear glasses? The answer is 3/15th, I think. If I could work out this kind of crap, I’d be the one firing Donald Trump. I’m more concerned about the “summer” camp in a Bajan exam; given Bajan hotels offering special rates for “spring” break, should we in Barbados expect “winter” camps this Christmas? But then I suppose Barbadian propriety couldn’t abide division of the year into the two tropical seasons of “wet” and “dry” since that would mean sending unchaperoned girls to wet camp.
Question 32. Sam paid $30 for one adult’s and four children’s cinema tickets. The adult ticket costs TWICE the cost of a child’s ticket. What is the price of a child’s ticket? Too high, if it was Black Swan. Sam should have taken advantage of the Expo 11-Plus specials, where an adult and child could get in for less than the price of one adult and then spend four times as much on hot dogs, popcorn and sour Skittles.
Question 36. Kim left home at 7:50 a.m. and arrived at school at 8:15 a.m. How long did it take her to get to school? Five minutes; she spent the other 20 minutes flirting with conductors at the ZR stand.
Question 51. A machine wraps 120 sweets in 30 seconds. How many sweets does it wrap in one minute? Far too many for the Barbados Workers’ Union, who would like the machine replaced by 20 workers in two shifts with three weeks’ vacation and overtime starting at 8 a.m.; not nearly enough for the Barbados Chamber of Commerce, who want all lazy workers fired, once they could somehow find enough money to buy machine-wrapped sweeties.That’s enough maths. Next week we do English.
BC Pires is heading for the school of hard knocks.
