Orange Christian School students tackled that question, and many others that can appear to the uninitiated as nothing more than squiggly lines, when completing the paper.

“It was harder and longer than expected,” student Hannah Upson said.

“I found the trigonometry question to be the hardest. I’m usually quite good at it, but my brain just froze.”

Hannah confessed she was more of an English student as did Rowena Ashton, who found the use of letters instead of numbers in one of the areas of maths to be her Achilles heel.

“I really don’t like algebra,” she said.

“But it was better than I thought, and I did like the multiple choice questions.”

Maths is a constant, and for the lover of all things numeric, Emily Rawson, the certainty of maths makes it most enjoyable.

“Maths is my favourite subject. Anything that involves logic, I like it,” she said.

“Unlike other subjects like English where there may not be any correct answer, it’s based more on how well you put forward your argument, maths is either right or wrong, and with algebra you can double-check your answer.”

Maths teacher John Giger said: “The paper had a good variety of questions allowing for differentiation between students. It contained some easier questions that most students should have been able to answer as well as some harder questions that required students to translate multiple known concepts into unfamiliar problems.”