Don’t jump, Felipe!

Peering over my son’s shoulder as he forced himself through a pile of practice IGCSE maths papers in readiness for this week’s exams, I was shocked both by the absence of pounds sterling and by the ardently international imaginary first names dreamed up by the question-setters. That ‘I’ stands for ‘international’ — and goodness, you’re not allowed to forget it.

‘Nyali paid $62 for a bicycle.’ ‘Alejandro goes to Europe for a holiday. He changes 500 pesos into euros at an exchange rate of…’ ‘Abdul invested $240…’ ‘At 05 06 Mr Ho bought 850 fish at a market for $2.62 each…’ ‘On 1 January 2000 Ashraf was x years old. Bukki was 5 years older than Ashraf and Claude was twice as old as Ashraf…’ At the sight of the final question, ‘Felipe stands 7 metres from a bridge’, I couldn’t help envisaging Felipe as a boy in suicidal mood, having had to navigate both this gruelling maths and the zealously multiracial landscape.

Bukki, Ashraf and Claude. Oh, I see: their names begin with ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, perhaps on purpose. For any imaginative teenager, though, it’s hard not to be distracted from the mathematical essence of the question by the temptation to flesh out this imaginary threesome: Ashraf the Arabian boy, Bukki the African boy, and Claude the P.G. Wodehouse character. As for Mr Ho, who gets up on the dot of ‘05 06’ to go to a market to buy far too many fish, paying dollars for them: what’s his story? A shopkeeper in Hong Kong?

I rang the headquarters of the Cambridge IGCSE exams to ask whether their exam-setters are given a list of acceptable names and acceptable currencies, as well as following the strictly international house style (long numbers are written in the international comma-less way, e.g.