Survivors from one of South Korea’s worst maritime disasters yesterday were among hundreds of thousands of high-school students across the country who sat the high-pressure annual college entrance exam.
Preparation for the crucial exam starts from elementary school, and the relentless pressure to score well has been blamed for everything from early burnout to teenage depression and suicide.
More than 630,000 students yesterday turned out for the exam and, as happens every year, the entire country went into hush-mode for the duration.
The extraordinary measures taken to ensure nothing affects the student’s concentration include a 35-minute suspension of all aircraft takeoffs and landings at South Korean airports to coincide with the main language listening test.
The exam is a stressful rite of passage for any student — but for none more so this year then several dozen students from Danwon High School in Ansan, south of Seoul.
In April last year, 325 of the school’s students were on an organized trip to the southern island of Jeju when the passenger ferry they were in sank.
Only 75 of them survived.
Most of the surviving students were in the same grade and took part in yesterday’s exam — seen off at the test centers by their anxious parents.
“After what happened, she became quite withdrawn and shunned people, as well as her studies,” Jang Dong-won, 46, said of his daughter. “But she somehow pulled herself out of it, and ended up hitting the books hard, staying late at school to study with her classmates.”
The survivors were offered a dispensation to apply to colleges without taking the exam, but most declined, despite the difficulties they had getting back into the grueling study routine the test demands.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS