Chapter 735: The Third Examination (3)
A spring rain and a warmth.
It rained all night last night, but it stopped as soon as the sun rose. The wind that blew was surprisingly warm.
The temperature is changing too fast.
Old Madam He also arranged for a doctor to give Sun Shan and other examinees a bowl of warm ginger soup before allowing them to enter the Imperial Examination Hall.
It is easy to get sick when it is cold at one time and warm at another.
If it were normal, I would definitely ask the doctor to prescribe medicine and boil it for me to drink.
At this special moment, Mrs. He was afraid that the problem would be counterproductive. She was afraid that the medicine might be poisonous, and she was afraid that the healthy person would become sick.
Therefore, it is best to let the candidates drink the universal ginger soup.
Sun Shan and his companions walked into the Imperial Examination Hall with round bellies and returned to the examination room again.
The examination room looked very lonely and desolate after the rain.
Sun Shan looked at his own stinky hole and found that the wooden board and the chopping board were not dry yet.
I touched the quilt and clothes, and they were dry.
Fortunately, the imperial court was not so cruel.
Sun Shan put down his things and resigned himself to setting up the shed.
I touched the oilcloth and found that the number was still the same as in the first and second games. They didn't even give a few more pieces. It was really unscrupulous.
What if it rains, won’t we get wet again?
What could Sun Shan do? He had to accept his fate.
After some hard jumping around, the roof was finally built.
As for Lengmojun next door, he had already completed his task and was staying in the examination room, meditating.
Sun Shan lifted the chopping board, lit the charcoal fire, and carefully roasted it dry.
The stars in the night sky outside twinkled occasionally, and judging from the clouds, it shouldn't rain.
Sun Shan couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.
However, Ye Xianglang still hadn't cleaned the toilet properly, and a faint foul smell blew over, causing Sun Shan to cover his nose.
I don’t know if it’s a psychological effect or the warm spring breeze, but the stench that blew over was even stinkier than the first and second times.
Spring is the season when all things come back to life, and the stench of the toilet may have also come back to life.
Sun Shan shook his head, applied some cooling oil, and instantly felt much better. He then continued to carefully grill the chopping board.
The next morning, after eating steamed buns for breakfast, Sun Shan went to the toilet. A foul odor came and he wished he could disappear right there.
When I returned to the dormitory, the bell rang and the test paper was soon presented to me.
The third test only examines classics, history, and current affairs, with a total of five questions.
It mainly examines candidates' insights into and ability to solve current political issues.
Each question in the "策问" section starts with "问", which means you are given a passage of material and are asked to read it and answer the questions or write down your own understanding.
Speaking of policy questions, the most famous one is the "Yuti Case" in the Ming Dynasty, with the famous Tang Bohu as the protagonist and two supporting roles, Xu Jing and Cheng Minzheng.
The story goes like this: the chief examiner, Minister of Rites Cheng Minzheng, set an extremely difficult question in the third exam. As a result, among all the candidates that year, only Tang Bohu and Xu Jing could answer it with what could be called perfect standard answers. This attracted reports from someone with ulterior motives, who suspected that Cheng Minzheng had leaked the question to the two before the exam.
The facts of this case are confusing, and the process was full of twists and turns, making it a historical mystery that has never been concluded. The right and wrong of this case can only be left to future generations to imagine.
But the people involved in the case suffered a tragedy.
The chief examiner Cheng Minzheng was imprisoned, and died shortly after his release due to old age and frailty, unable to withstand the torture in prison.
The candidate Tang Yin was imprisoned and demoted to an official. He was never allowed to enter the examination hall for the rest of his life and lived a miserable life.
The candidate Xu Jing was imprisoned and also stripped of his official status and demoted to a minor official. He eventually died in the capital at the age of 35.
The only consolation is that he has a descendant named Xu Xiake who is a household name.
Sun Shan thought that he would not be as unlucky as the two candidates involved in the "question selling case".
Because after arriving in the capital, he did nothing.
First of all, he had never met the chief examiner or the co-examiner. In fact, even if he wanted to meet them, there was no way to see them. There was no way the officials would meet a nobody like Sun Shan.
Secondly, I didn’t buy the leaked test questions that are secretly circulating in the market with the promise of “ten times the compensation for fake test results”.
When Gui Ge'er heard Kong Yi's servant say there was such a leaked test question, he asked him if he wanted it.
The silly Gui Ge'er really wanted to buy it at a high price, and finally came back to ask Sun Shan for money because he was short of one or two taels.
Naturally, I couldn’t buy it.
Sun Shan believed that the test questions might have been leaked, but he didn't believe that Gui Ge'er, a book boy, could have access to the leaked test questions.
In this case, it is 100% certain that the person is a liar, so Sun Shan will naturally not be fooled.
He also warned Gui Ge'er not to interfere with the examination questions. If something went wrong, it would not be Gui Ge'er who would be in trouble, but him, the only hope of Sunjia Village.
Gui Ge'er begged for mercy quickly, saying that he was too concerned and would not do bad things with good intentions again, and would not act on his own initiative.
Seeing that he truly knew he was wrong and had been fooled by a mix of true and false news, Sun Shan's eyes turned red and he forgave him out of a moment of weakness.
But the death penalty can be avoided, but the living punishment cannot be escaped.
They only let Guiger go after he was starving to death.
Sun Shan opened the paper and took a look. There were five questions, each requiring more than a thousand words, with no restrictions on the format.
There is a strict rule when answering questions, which is that you cannot ridicule current affairs.
If what you write touches the imperial court's sore spot, especially the emperor's sore spot, dismissal would be a minor matter.
What I fear most is being used by someone with ulterior motives, and if the emperor finds out, I’ll lose my head in a matter of minutes.
Sun Shan often does his homework with great awe, not daring to be "weird" for fear that he will be eliminated by logistics.
There was a question in the policy paper about border defense, the general meaning of which was: Yunnan and Yun had just been conquered and were still unstable. What should be done to stabilize the border?
In order to answer this question, Sun Shan not only had to know the latest developments of the court, but also had to figure out who was fighting whom in Dianyun and why it was so unstable.
You must know the cause and effect, and then combine it with reality to write a policy paper.
If you don't understand what's happening in the court, you won't be able to write an article. Even if you can write one, it will just be some empty and false ideas.
Such unrealistic articles, which seem to have empty content, will not be included in the list.
Sun Shan couldn't help but feel fortunate that because Lord Zhou Ruozhou was demoted, he paid special attention to the situation in Dianyun. Through the information given by Minister He and the information he read himself, he roughly knew the current situation in Dianyun.
Faced with this question that was both unfamiliar and familiar, Sun Shan was filled with mixed emotions.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
What makes me laugh is that I have enough knowledge about current affairs to be able to make meaningful remarks after outlining the causes and consequences.
They were crying for Lord Zhou. They never thought that Lord Zhou's suffering would become a stepping stone for Sun Shan to move closer to success.
Thinking this way, I feel a serious sense of moral guilt.
Sun Shan shook his head and stopped thinking about it.
Since this question is the most familiar, choose it as the beginning and solve it first.
I silently said in my heart: Mr. Zhou, you must take care of yourself. Only if you live long enough, you will have a chance to turn the tables. Only if you live long enough, you can be the final winner.
Sun Shan buried his head in writing until the bell rang, and then he came back to reality from the topic.
Sun Shan took a look at the articles. The first one was almost finished. After lunch, he would polish his pen and start working on the second one.
Lunch was still big white steamed buns. Sun Shan chewed the buns mechanically like a robot until he could no longer chew them.