China's college entrance examination - Gao Kao

There is an article in NYTimes about how the Chinese population is obsessed with a certain examination called the gao kao - which is the entrance examination to the 1900 or so, institutions of higher learning. Parents pull out all stops for their children to get a good score on this, based on which you can get an admit into the different tiers of universities (top tier, second tier etc). Does sound familiar does it not ? Like the IIT, DoT, DoM, CET, or whatever regional test that Indian students go through to get into the various engineering and medical colleges. Except, there are so many of them in India, vs, one unified gigantic examination for the entire chinese population. More than 10 million Chinese students take the test. A lot of the article seems to be like the regimen that a lot of students go through in India as well, but one thing blew mo over. Check this out:

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores. In Sichuan Province in southwestern China, students studied in a hospital, hooked up to oxygen containers, in hopes of improving their concentration.

Wow and look at this picture. [caption id="attachment_1239" align="alignleft" width="468" caption="pic courtesy: news.163.com"]

[/caption] Read the NYTimes article here . Some more pictures of oxygen studying here .