When the messenger came to Lu Cheng's house with a wooden sign, Lu Cheng saw the exam questions this time, and he scratched his head for a while, and there were seven big characters written on it: "Those who are in vain will not be solid in learning." Pen Fun Pavilion www.biquge.info"

Those who are in vain will not be solid in learning?

Lu Cheng was depressed for a while, this master was really playing interception, and he didn't know if there was such a tricky exam question, was there any copying?

This is a feature of the imperial examination in the Ming Dynasty, with small questions or truncated questions.

The question is to select a sentence, cut off the second half or the first half of the sentence, and only use half of that sentence as the test question. And the interception is even more perverted, find two sentences arbitrarily from the "Four Books", and then cut off half of each sentence, and put them together to become an exam question, some donkey lips are not right horses' mouths.

This situation is very common in the children's examination, after all, it is a local small examination, and the court will not pay too much attention to it. The college examination is the most critical scientific examination in the children's examination, and it is the first threshold for candidates to enter the imperial examination.

Therefore, the questions in the township examination and the general examination are often not as difficult as the questions in the hospital examination. However, difficulty does not determine anything, and the simpler the question, the more difficult it is to stand out from the crowd.

In the exams that started from the township test to the top, the questions were decent. After all, the back are all big exams, and the examiner will not be allowed to ask this type of question to embarrass the candidates, which is too damaging to the image of the imperial court.

This kind of small examination will not be paid much attention to by the imperial court, as long as it is in accordance with the normal rules of the imperial examination, it can produce any kind of tricky examination questions.

In fact, this can't all depend on the examiner, the imperial examination questions can only be selected from the four books and five classics, and the scope will be narrowed a lot, this system has been carried out for so many years, it is inevitable that there will be many repeated exam questions.

In this way, there will be candidates to guess the questions before the scientific examination, select a range, and recite many of the Cheng Wen who have been admitted in the previous scientific examination.

Cheng Wen is equivalent to a model of composition in later generations, which is specially compiled into a book and sold to candidates, which is more popular with candidates than the Four Books and Five Classics. There are also people who invite the famous scholars and great Confucians of the time to spend money to write 1,200 Cheng Wen for themselves to memorize.

The use of rote memorization and opportunistic methods by the candidates to deal with the imperial examination will cause the candidates to learn nothing, and it will certainly not be a good thing for the imperial court to hire such a person as an official in the future.

The examiners came up with this method of making small questions and intercepting questions to try to avoid Cheng Wen's situation of coping with the scientific examination.

The first half of today's exam question is from "Mencius", and the original sentence is "Those who have wronged themselves have failed to have a straight person." This means that it is impossible to make others righteous by mistakenly distorting one's own opinions.

And the second half of the sentence is from the "Analects" in the "Analects": "Zi said, if a gentleman is not heavy, he is not powerful, and if he learns, he is not solid." The explanation of this sentence is: Confucius said that if a gentleman does not behave in a dignified manner, he will have no prestige, and the knowledge he has learned will not be remembered firmly.

But with this Tixue adult, the original meaning has changed.

What is this?

For those who are not upright, what they have learned is not solid?

There is no standard answer to this thing, and in many cases, whether you can pass the exam or not depends entirely on figuring out the examiner's thoughts. If you guess the deep meaning implied in his title, it will be easy to hit the list, otherwise you will fall into the list.

There are five or six hundred candidates in this examination room, and the time to mark the papers is only three days, no matter how diligent the examiner is, it is impossible to read every paper, unless he has the skill of clone.

Therefore, it is particularly important to solve the questions, and the papers that the examiner will read carefully are basically the ones that are good at solving the questions.

How can someone who can't solve a problem write an article?

On the other hand, the person who can solve the problem must write well!

This is the thinking of the examiners, as long as you solve the question correctly, even if the essay is poorly written, it is very likely to be admitted.

Lu Cheng didn't dare to be blindly confident in his problem-solving, and while studying the ink, he intercepted this sentence in his mind, and the answer he searched made his eyes shine.

It seems that although this question is tricky, it is not that there are no similar exam questions, and there are more than 1,000 articles in the eight strands of literature searched, all of which are articles that have been admitted to the college examination.

He picked and chose and found an article that looked very good, which was written by a court examination in the last years of the Ming Dynasty. Although I can't write such a good eight-strand essay, I can still tell the good from the bad just by looking at it.

After Lu Cheng carefully compared several other articles, he found that the problems were very similar, and he should not be wrong, so he copied them directly on the paper, and he didn't even need to type the draft.

As the so-called head has more than 10,000 books in his head, and his pen is like a god, it can be used to describe Lu Cheng's state at this time.

Anyway, the article at the head of the case is absolutely good, and as for whether you can be admitted, it all depends on whether you can cater to this Wu Tixue's preferences.

While many candidates were still pondering and meditating, hesitating about how to solve the question, Lu Cheng had already completed the first four-book question. To be precise, the efficiency of copying the article is still very high, and others can't compare.

After answering the first question in the "Four Books", there is another question selected from the "Five Classics". It should be said that there are five exam questions, and candidates choose one of them to answer.

And the question that the candidate wants to choose is related to his own scriptures.

Unlike the previous dynasties, the imperial examination in the Ming Dynasty did not take subjects such as "Moyi" and "Tijing" for a long time, and focused more on the scriptures. The exam questions are selected from the four books and five classics, and the eight-strand text is used to answer the questions, and the format also has strict requirements, which is composed of eight parts: "breaking the question, undertaking the question, starting to speak, entering the question, starting the stock, middle share, back share, and bundle share".

Candidates are not allowed to play freely, but must quote scriptures and borrow the arguments of the saints to make articles, which is called "speaking on behalf of the saints".

The Ming Dynasty revered Zhu Xi, and candidates were required to familiarize themselves with the Confucian classics compiled by him, such as the Commentary on the Four Books and Chapters and Sentences, as well as the Commentary on the Five Classics, the Book of Filial Piety, the Zhou Li, the Warring States Policy, and the Chinese Language, the most important of which were the four books of the University, the Middle Mean, and the Analects.

The so-called "Benjing" is equivalent to an elective subject, because there are too many commentaries on the Five Classics, it is difficult for candidates to learn all of them, so they only need to choose one of the Five Classics.

In these years, most candidates generally choose the "Book of Songs" as their own scripture, and Lu Cheng also followed the trend, and the scripture he chose since childhood is this.

But he didn't need to pay attention to it so much, he opened the book system in his head again, entered the exam questions of this scripture, found an article at the beginning of the case, and began to copy a lot, and was very busy.

Generally speaking, the examiner mainly looks at the first four books, as long as the answer to this question satisfies the examiner, he can basically win the list. As for the Pentateuch inscriptions, it is also forgivable that they are slightly poorly written.

When the other candidates were still answering the first question, Lu Cheng had already finished answering the question again, stretched his waist with satisfaction, and said in his heart: "It's so tiring to copy, so I just say that I rely on my own thinking to answer the question, this imperial examination is indeed not an easy thing!" ”

Looking up at the window, before it was noon, he took out a flatbread from his test basket and nibbled on it.

Using the book system in his head twice in a row, Lu Cheng felt very tired. It was still early, so he lay on the wooden board after eating and went to play chess with Zhou Gong.