Not just AMC8! The Math Kangaroo Competition is also popular, and students are preparing for…

The gust of the Mathematical Olympiad has been blowing again and again, and immigrant parents have become nervous when they see the Chinese “slaughter the list” in major math competitions.

In the final analysis, if you want your children to go to prestigious universities such as American Ivy League schools and British G5, they still cannot avoid mathematics until the end of their academic performance.

Whether it is thinking training, ability improvement, or adding points to resumes, Mathematical Olympiad is definitely the most effective way. In addition to the well-known AMC, the Kangaroo Math Competition is also an international competition that is popular both at home and abroad (speaking quietly, we will send out math competition questions today).

01 Math Kangaroo

Chinese parents must be familiar with Math Kangaroo. The Kangaroo Math Competition is the world’s largest mathematical thinking challenge competition for teenagers, and the North American Mathematical Olympiad. More than 6.3 million students from 87 countries and regions around the world participate every year.

Among them, nearly 1 million teenagers from Russia and Germany take part in the competition every year, and it is even more difficult to find a place for the competition in California, USA.

Although these competitions can be participated from preschool children to G12, it is mainly the children of G1-G6 who sign up more.

Different from the high difficulty of other competitions, the Kangaroo Math Competition is less difficult, which helps to cultivate children’s interest in mathematics.

Moreover, the form of the questions is flexible, vivid and lifelike, and the scenes are novel, which help to train children’s mathematical thinking, as well as develop their reading comprehension, analysis and problem-solving abilities.

Its topic setting is very interesting. Every two grades are regarded as a level, and the same set of test papers is taken. So grades 1 and 2 use Level 1 test papers, grades 3 and 4 use Level 2 test papers, and so on.

Because many of the tests are about mathematical thinking, and some mathematical theorems are not even used to solve the problems, it is not a problem for two grades to take the same test paper.

02 Exercising 3 major mathematical abilities

Reading comprehension

As we all know, questions that are not circumvented and have too few conditions are not called Mathematical Olympiad questions. Therefore, the first step in solving a problem is to understand the stem of the problem and open up the mind, which means that children must strengthen their reading comprehension skills.

For example, the following question is an L2 question suitable for children in grades 3-4. There are many assumptions in the question:

①There are 3 types of cards, ②Choose two and exchange positions,

③ Make cards with the same fruit pattern adjacent to each other,

And the final question is: Which of the following groups is impossible to achieve the above requirements?

Although the words are not difficult, it is more difficult to understand, and it is very easy for children to miss “not” because they read too fast, and these are all testing children’s reading ability. Not to mention, if there are still unfamiliar words in the title, you can only make bold guesses based on the context…

Therefore, improving the reading level is the first step in cultivating children’s mathematical thinking. If you can’t understand the questions, no matter how strong your calculation ability is, it’s useless!

Visual perception ability

The cultivation of visual perception ability is also very important, because more than half of the questions in the kangaroo math competition are combined with images. Children must be able to understand pictures, analyze pictures, and restore images in their brains.

Simpler ones, such as this L1 question for children in grades 1-2, let the child restore the image she saw in the mirror.

She needs to flip each number 180 degrees in her brain, imagine what it will look like after it is flipped, and then think about how the numbers are arranged in order, and finally she can get the correct answer “A”.

When it comes to grades 3-4, the difficulty of examination changes from flat images to three-dimensional images. For example, the following classic “grid combination problem” requires children not only to have good image perception ability, but also to have certain spatial imagination ability.

In this question, only the bottom layer is missing the cube, and the white cube only occupies the two lower right grids, so the correct answer is “E”. Can you see it?

Visual perception is widely used in mathematics, which is directly related to children’s future geometry and spatial thinking ability, so parents must exercise their children’s abilities in this area.

Mathematical modeling ability

Modeling can be said to be the soul of major mathematics competitions and mathematics courses in European and American countries. Even our Wukong International Math courses adopt the Singapore CPA modeling method~

The reason why children are required to have mathematical modeling ability is, on the one hand, to benchmark various application problems in courses and competitions, and on the other hand, to lay the foundation for applying mathematical knowledge to real life in the future.

Let’s take a look at an application problem, and everyone will understand. This question is L3, an exam question suitable for children in grades 5-6: Calculate how many deciliters of apple juice can be contained in a medium-sized bottle based on the same weight of apple juice in bottles of different sizes on the three shelves.

Suppose we use A, B, and C to represent large, medium, and small bottles, respectively,

The first model: 3*A+4*C=64;

The second model: 2*A+3*C+2*B=64;

The third model: 6*C+4*B=64, that is (3*C+2*B)*2=64

• With these 3 models, you can easily calculate 3*C+2*B=32 first;
• Substituting into the second model, you can know that A=16; re-entering the first model, you can know that C=4;
• Finally, substituting the result of C into the third model, we know that B=10, so the correct answer is “D”.

Competition questions like this can only be calculated by modeling. Moreover, mastering the mathematical modeling ability will also help children improve other mathematical abilities, and it will be much easier to play games~

Therefore, parents who want to send their children to learn Mathematical Olympiad, play competitions, and go to Ivy League schools must make plans early, lay a solid foundation in mathematics, and grasp the progress.

But I still want to remind parents that no matter how good the competition is, Mathematical Olympiad is not the only way to cultivate thinking or climb vines!

To learn mathematics well, you still need to start with the knowledge in books, and then strengthen your training step by step within your ability.