Has anyone ever made a prediction in front of you about an unlikely event, and later turned out to be true? This has happened to me countless times and I either feel amazed or very upset. In elementary school, I was traumatised by a highly improbable event that a friend predicted to me. It was related to the Grade 7 CEMC Gauss Math Contest that I wrote in my Grade 6 year.
Before the contest started, I felt very nervous; beads of sweat trickled down my forehead, and when I looked at my surroundings, everyone else who wrote the contest were older than me and seemed unfamiliar to me. I didn't think I would become very successful at that time. During the contest, I worked very hard on all the questions. The contest questions were arranged in order of difficulty, so I found the first couple of questions to be easy and then they started to get more difficult as I progressed. I became stumped on the last few questions, and since it was a multiple choice contest, I had to guess the answers for them. After finishing the Grade 7 CEMC Gauss Math Contest, one of my friends told me that I would get a perfect score on my contest. I only laughed at him as I found the situation nearly impossible. I was thinking in my own head about how a mere Grade 6 could earn a perfect score on a challenging Grade 7 math contest created by a top-level mathematics institution. A while later, when the math contests were all marked, my math teacher showed me my mark, and it turned out that I really obtained a perfect score on the math contest! I believe that the cause of this turnout was due to three aspects: preparation, my hard work ethic, and LUCK! By preparing for the contest (e.g. doing previous math contest problems), I was able to put a lot of effort into most of the contest questions and solve them correctly. However, when it came to the questions that I was stuck on, I had to rely on some luck by guessing the correct/most sensible answer. Improbable events are not always impossible; they can happen if you work hard to make them happen.
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