[FANYI-L] "Tall test" for university entrance exam

[LanDi Liu]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Evidently the issue in the e-mail below is that "tall" and "test" are =20=
> the two characters used as the abbreviation for what appears to be a =20
> national unified regular high (tall) school entrance examination =20
> (test).

Actually gao1kao3 refers to the national college entrance examination.

Googling for "tall test" produces a lot of sports results, including
this one from 1995:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4738034.html

I'm an idiot when it comes to sports so I don't know if this has been
a sports term in English for a while, but I would guess that given the
above article (and the frequency of other Sports articles), this
didn't come from Chinese.

On the other hand, using a term like that in reference to the Olympics
in China fits in well with typical "clever" headline usage since
gao1kao3 is an extremely common word in China.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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