Are You Smarter Than a High School Senior?

By senior year, math has moved into precalculus territory, science courses expect you to juggle chemistry and physics fundamentals at the same time, and English class has usually worked its way through a stack of canonical novels and at least one Shakespeare tragedy. This quiz tests whether any of it stuck.

Trig, Logs, and the Algebra That Still Sneaks In

Precalculus is largely about getting comfortable with trigonometric functions and logarithms before calculus demands you use them on the fly. Knowing that sin(90 degrees) equals 1 and cos(180 degrees) equals -1 comes from picturing the unit circle, while log base 2 of 8 equals 3 because 2 raised to the third power is 8. Even a seemingly tricky expression like (x squared - 1) over (x - 1) simplifies neatly to x + 1, since the numerator factors into (x - 1)(x + 1) and the (x - 1) terms cancel.

• Logarithms answer the question "what exponent gets me here."
• The unit circle gives exact values for common trig angles without a calculator.
• Simplifying rational expressions almost always starts with factoring.

Reactions, Forces, and the Books Everyone Assigns

Senior-level science blends chemistry, where atomic number and pH define how substances behave, with physics concepts like Newton's second law, which ties force directly to mass and acceleration. Meanwhile, English classes tend to circle back to the same heavyweight authors, from Jane Austen's social comedies to Orwell's warnings about surveillance.