Expand Your Brain
[All levels - Logic]
Would you happen to know what a contradiction is? Are you comfortable with contradictions?
I certainly am not. They hurt my head sometimes, but knowing (or at least having exposure to) these logical problems are important for thinking about things critically. For example, suppose you want to read a Chinese passage, and infer what the narrator is feeling. Having grasped the nature of logic, you can clearly outline everything that's happening to the narrator much better than you would just trying to read the text and highlighting keywords.
It works for Maths too. In 2021, there was a PSLE question about Helen and Ivan having coins, but that question depended on two separate parameters that coins had: They had weight as an object, and they had value as currency.
If you paid attention, you would have noticed that the part a) and b) in the Helen and Ivan question are only connected to each other from one point: How much of a difference they have. That's the only thing they have with each other, and it's not the question that's hard; it's the mindset.
Being drilled by tuition teachers that can't help you see the bigger picture over and over again, memorising things like a robot, that's not maths, it's engineering. We've been fundamentally teaching Maths the wrong way in Singapore, both in schools and most education centres. It's important to broaden your horizons and try out new things - You never know, it might turn out to be your favourite subject.
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