TBH if I were 15 again I’d probably end up “reverse engineering” the question in the same way Requiem did.
The profs who set the exam questions are not that sadistic and realise teenagers are under pressure – they often drop a few extra hidden clues to the answer in with the question.
as long as you show some sort of working as to how you arrived at the equation would get at least some if not all of the marks. It doesn’t unfortunately work at University and can even lead to you being thrown out of there (mind you that was on top of using the academic network to circulate info about controlled drugs, via a staff account I had somehow acquired from the the student union; and crashing the kernel on a multi user computer with a buffer overflow from flawed code (that was a genuine accident!)
I recently started to read a very large but particularly good free e-book from this American radio engineer who is about 70+
He had done his national service for the US Army (back then you didn’t get a choice about this) in Japan during the 1950s – helping “rebuild” the place (although the Japanese were quite capable of doing this themselves) and set up various communications equipment. Probably the start of the NSA; but this is also why USA and Japanese hobby electronics projects often use the same components.
The book has to be printed out and when done so fills up two European lever arch binders; and covers everything from the basics of wireless communications to building an entire digital controlled HF receiver (which is quite some challenge as you must keep the noise from the computer bits out of the RF circuitry whilst still controlling it).
it is unusual for me to bother with that for an American book because by the time I’m done with translating it back into British/European English and converting all the units to metric I might as well have read it in Dutch, German or even Danish or Norweigian. This dude however actually understands there is a world outside the USA; most of it uses metric; and best of all explains in clear and simple terms you do not need to know all that hard maths to do more advanced things with electronics. you only need to have passed your GCSE maths exam (or its equivalent in your country) and know how to use a scientific pocket calculator. There is still an entire chapter of maths revision and it is difficult; but I was reading a bit of that last night (on the WC!) and learned more from that than an entire year at University.
