Are you are a star at geography? Can you answer Chinese exam question looking at earth from space that left students flummoxed?
An unusual exam geography question – featuring a man on the moon looking at the earth – left a number of Chinese students scratching their heads, mainland media reports. But can you work out the answer?
This image used in the test paper – part of a series of exams taken by 350,000 high-school students on Saturday and Sunday across Jiangsu province – is the same one that appears on screen for about a second when mainlanders log on to the WeChat social media blogging app, the news website Thepaper.cn reported on Monday.
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The question asked students to observe the earth and the shape of the clouds to work out whether the picture was taken in June or December, and if the wind at the time had been blowing from the west or the southeast side of the planet.
The composite image features an illustration of a man standing on the moon looking out towards the earth, which is actually a real photograph, known as The Blue Marble, which was taken by the crew of the American Apollo 17 spacecraft from a distance of about 45,000km above the earth in 1972.
Last weekend’s exams are also called the “mini-gaokao” because they are held ahead before the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, commonly known as Gaokao.
“I’ve never seen a question like this,” the report by Thepaper.cn quoted one student saying. “I feel like I have wasted all my time using WeChat.”
A teacher told the news website that the creative question had sparked a lot of discussion and left many candidates surprised.
The air flow depicted in the image also showed that the picture proved that the wind had been coming from the west, the teacher added.
The original photograph was taken by the Apollo 17 crew on December 7, 1972, on the way to the moon,
The Nasa website said the photograph was the first time astronauts were able to photograph the South polar ice cap.
Nearly the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible in the picture, along with the Arabian Peninsula.
Apollo 17, manned by Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt, was the US space agency Nasa’s final Apollo mission to the moon. Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon on July 21, 1969.
