And to then being told you were not allowed to use a calculator and had 19 more questions like it to answer within an hour?
Josh Quon (13), of John McGlashan College, Dunedin, was in his element when the University of Otago's Final Challenge asked New Zealand's top intermediate maths pupils to do just that.
He made his way to the top of the university's annual mathematics competition, called Problem Challenge, in which about 38,000 intermediate pupils from across New Zealand participated.
The competition involved answering five sets of questions, five times during the year, organiser John Shanks said.
Those who correctly answered 19 of the 25 questions were invited to take part in the Final Challenge, a one-hour test consisting of 20 questions.
Josh was first in the November test, out of about 1700 other pupils, with his score of 19 out of 20.
"This was an outstanding achievement, as some of the harder questions would challenge university mathematics students, especially given the time limit," Mr Shanks said.
Josh said he read through all the questions, then always started at the beginning and was able to find the answers the old fashioned way "with pencil and paper".
In May, his team won the year 8 section of the Otago Mathletics Competition and in a University of New South Wales maths exam he sat in July, he achieved high distinction, placing him in the first percentile in New Zealand.
Josh's favourite subject was maths, so much so he worked on a Fibonacci series - a sequence of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers - in his spare time.
In the future, he hoped to do "something that can help people, like a doctor".
