Gimai Seikatsu

It felt like the final struggle of summer. With the sun shining directly down onto the earth, the temperatures rose drastically, and by the time I made it to the prep school, it was at least 30°C. In order to immediately escape this heat, I quickly made my way inside the building. After the automatic door closed behind me, separating me from the outside heat, I finally felt like I was able to breathe. After taking a deep breath of the cool air, I started walking.

I opened the door with the ‘Self-study room’ plate above it. Even though I had arrived at about the same time as yesterday, the room was a lot more crowded. I looked around the room and spotted Fujinami-san sitting at the same place as yesterday. Luckily, the seat next to her was open, so I took the opportunity to occupy it. She had already been working on her textbooks and notes for a while, judging from how focused she was.

Naturally, I didn’t call out to her. I simply took out my material, focusing on my physics workbook, which had cost me a few points in my end-of-term exams, thus my final grade was only 70 points. However, that doesn’t correspond to me not understanding what they taught us in class—I think. Assuming the questions were all fair, achieving 70% like that is a totally fine achievement.

That being said, I just have trouble coming up with the correct formula to calculate these things. The physical phenomena taught in high school are mostly things you can envision while reading a book, and I try my best to remember them before it reaches that class in question. I just keep falling behind in speed when it comes to actually performing the calculations.

Now then… Hmm, write down the speed of acceleration an object on a smooth slope experiences, huh? Usually, and not only limited to physics, the most general advice when it comes to exam questions is to first read the question carefully. For example, what stands out is the phrase ‘Smooth slope’. In other words, it’s a slope where you don’t have to consider friction.

The reason that an average cardboard box, when set at the top of a hill, doesn’t slide down like a block of ice is because of the friction between the ground and the box. However, average high school physics questions usually don’t follow such a pragmatic approach. On a whim, I started thinking about how this would play out at a university. Ayase-san’s words from yesterday floated around in my mind.

‘And not in the sense that somebody tells you to think about it, but rather to find your own thought process and put it into your own words.’

In other words, when attending university, you create the problem you then have to resolve yourself. For example, what if this slope actually had friction? What if this slope didn’t even exist on a planet like earth? That sounds pretty fun, to be honest. Oh yeah, that was something like that in a science fiction novel I read. If something like this happens on the surface of the moon, there’s barely any gravity to measure, and even a drop of water runs down your skin a lot slower than it would on earth. Oh man, I can’t even imagine what shower scenes would look like if they were animated… Acceleration, yep. Back to acceleration. Um…

I heard the sound of pencils scribbling on top of the paper, followed by the sound of the paper being turned over. Whenever I finished a question and flipped over the page, almost as if responding to my success, someone else flipped over their page as well. It’s like a competition of sorts. An odd feeling of solidarity filled me, making me smirk.