Sporting a stylish dress and with her hair permed straight, Luo Yan is dressed up in order to appear sophisticated enough for a job, most likely a hotel hostess or shop assistant in Chongqing's city proper.

The girl's soft voice trails off to a whisper and her eyes become misty at the mention of the national college admission testthat will start on Sunday.

"I'm not dumb. I never flunked any test before."

Her confidence was shattered two months ago by an admission test at a local vocational school.

The test was full of "bizarre" questions, including how to telltwo people's relations by looking at how close they stand to each other during their conversation and the meaning of all the marks and symbols on snack wrappings.

Luo, born to a peasant's family in the suburbs of Chongqing, never even saw a snack wrapper in her life and the teachers at her countryside school never taught her any communication skills. With little access to the wide world outside her rural town, textbook knowledge was all that she knew would appear on test papers.

Frustrated by the failure, Luo weighed the pros and cons of a college education and decided she should quit.

"Even if I take the national test and enter college, the high tuition would be a heavy burden on my family. At the end of four years, I might not even find a job."

The minimum tuition for a Chinese college is 5,000 yuan (US$714) a year, higher than the 4,861 yuan of net per capita income for the rural population in 2008.

Luo decided her best chance was to find a job now and help her parents support her younger brother through college.