How Paper 2 varies, year to year

Topic mix by year

Every paper is built to the same strand quotas — the balance barely moves, but which topic fills each slot does.

How often each topic comes up

The same fourteen papers, split by topic instead of strand. Each cell is how many of that year's 45 questions went to that topic — read across a row to see how steady a topic is, down a column to see what one paper looked like.

Every year column sums to 45. A 0 means the topic sat out that paper — those gaps are where the rotation lives.

How we rate difficulty

Difficulty comes from the HKEAA's own per-question territory-wide correct rate, blended with the worked-solution step count and banded into five levels. The correct rate carries most of the weight, so a rating reflects how candidates actually performed, not just where the question sat in the paper.