Students take the Chinese test at an examination hall in Guiyang, Guizhou province, on Saturday. Qin Gang / for China Daily

Culture insider: China's ancient gaokao system

College entrance exams around the world

The two-day nationwide college entrance exam, or gaokao, ended on June 8. This year, 9.39 million students took the exam.

The subject Chinese encountered the first morning, and after it ended, the writing subjects of different provinces were released, triggering hot discussions online.

On Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, there are almost 98,000 posts regarding the gaokao writing questions.

An online vote by sohu.com shows most people agree that Beijing's and Shanghai's writing questions are the best, while many Internet users say Anhui's writing question is the weirdest.

There were 18 different sets of exams floating around China with different writing tests.

Here are a few of them.

The National Standardized Exam Paper I shared by provinces including Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi and Hebei:

Goats pass a single-log bridge.

A school is holding a sports meeting with the last event being "Goats pass a single-log bridge", in which two students start walking from the two ends of a single-log bridge. The rules require when the two meet, one will pass along the bridge and the other will get off the bridge. But at this year's preliminary contest, a pair of students clasped each other when meeting in the middle of the bridge before they turned around and so the two both managed to pass the bridge. The referee believes the act is controversial. Please write an article according to this story.

The National Standardized Exam Paper II shared by provinces and regions including Inner Mongolia, Guizhou and Tibet:

Feeding animals in parks makes them lose their ability to hunt for food.

Don't feed small animals at tourist spots and let them find their food on their own so they don't lose their ability to find food. Please write an article according to the material.