Question:
Passage: A speedy drafting process was required because Roosevelt, Churchill and their political and military advisors converged for the Quadrant Conference at the Citadelle of Quebec on 17 August, hosted by the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King. Most of the discussions were about the invasion of France. Although the Quebec Agreement was a bilateral one to which Canada was not a signatory, the British felt that Canada's contribution to Tube Alloys was significant enough that high-level representation was appropriate. King was therefore asked to nominate a Canadian member of the Combined Policy Committee, and he selected C. D. Howe, the Canadian Minister of Munitions and Supply. Stimson, Bush and Conant would be the American members, while Field Marshal Sir John Dill and Colonel J. J. Llewellin would be the British members.On 19 August Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Quebec Agreement, which was typed on four pages of Citadelle notepaper, and formally titled "Articles of Agreement governing collaboration between the authorities of the USA and UK in the matter of Tube Alloys". The United Kingdom and the United States agreed that "it is vital to our common safety in the present War to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition at the earliest moment", and that this was best accomplished by pooling their resources. The Quebec Agreement stipulated that:
The US and UK would pool their resources to develop nuclear weapons with a free exchange of information;
Neither country would use them against the other;
Neither country would use them against other countries without consent;
Neither country would pass information about them to other countries without consent;.

Passage: Roosevelt regarded this offer of a joint project as sufficiently important to have the letter personally delivered by Frederick L. Hovde, the head of the NDRC mission in London, but Churchill did not respond until December. He assured Roosevelt of his willingness to collaborate, and informed him that Hovde had discussed the matter with Sir John Anderson and Lord Cherwell, as Frederick Lindemann was now known. The MAUD Committee had considered the issue of collaboration with the United States, and had concluded that while pilot isotope separation plants could be established in the United Kingdom, full-scale production facilities would have to be built in the United States. The British expressed concerns about the security of the American project. Ironically, it was the British project that had already been penetrated by atomic spies. John Cairncross had given the Soviet Union a copy of the MAUD Committee report. Although not conveyed to the Americans, the British had other concerns about what might happen after the war if the Americans embraced isolationism, as had occurred after the First World War, and Britain had to fight the Soviet Union alone. The opportunity for a joint project was therefore missed. British and American exchange of information continued but their programmes remained separate.
The Tube Alloys Directorate considered whether Britain could produce a bomb without American help. A gaseous diffusion plant to produce 1 kg of weapons-grade uranium per day was estimated to cost up to £3 million in research and development, and anything up to £50 million to build in wartime Britain. A nuclear reactor to produce 1 kg of plutonium per day would have to be built in Canada. It would take up to five years to build and cost £5 million. The project would also require facilities for producing the required heavy water for the reactor costing between £5 million and £10 million, and for producing uranium metal, which would cost another £1.5 million. The project would need overwhelming priority, as it was estimated to require 20,000 workers, many of them highly skilled, 500,000 tons of steel, and 500,000 kW of electricity. Disruption to other wartime projects would be inevitable, and it was unlikely to be ready in time to affect the outcome of the war in Europe. The unanimous response was that before embarking on this, another effort should be made to obtain American co-operation.By March 1943 Bush and Conant had decided that British help would benefit some areas of the Manhattan Project. In particular, it could benefit enough from assistance from Chadwick and one or two other British scientists to warrant the risk of revealing weapon design secrets. Bush, Conant and Groves wanted Chadwick and Peierls to discuss bomb design with Robert Oppenheimer, and the construction company Kellogg wanted British comments on the design of the gaseous diffusion plant it was building.

Passage: During the early part of the Second World War, Britain had a nuclear weapons project codenamed Tube Alloys. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, and the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project to create a combined British, American and Canadian project. The September 1944 Hyde Park Aide-Mémoire extended commercial and military cooperation into the post-war period. Many of Britain's top scientists participated in the Manhattan Project. The Quebec Agreement specified that nuclear weapons would not be used against another country without mutual consent. On 4 July 1945, Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson agreed on Britain's behalf to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.The British government considered nuclear technology to be a joint discovery, and trusted that America would continue to share it. On 16 November 1945, President Harry S. Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee signed a new agreement that replaced the Quebec Agreement's requirement for "mutual consent" before using nuclear weapons with one for "prior consultation", and there was to be "full and effective cooperation in the field of atomic energy", but this was only "in the field of basic scientific research". The United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) ended technical cooperation. Its control of "restricted data" prevented US allies from receiving any information. Fearing a resurgence of American isolationism, and Britain losing its great power status, the UK government restarted its own development effort, now codenamed High Explosive Research.In 1949, the Americans offered to make atomic bombs in the US available for Britain to use if the British agreed to curtail their atomic bomb programme. This would have given Britain nuclear weapons much sooner than its own target date of late 1952. Only those bomb components required by war plans would be stored in the UK; the rest would be kept in the US and Canada. The offer was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff on the grounds that it was not "compatible with our status as a first class power to depend on others for weapons of this supreme importance". As a counter-offer, they proposed limiting the British nuclear weapons programme in return for American bombs. The opposition of key American officials, including the United States Atomic Energy Commission's Lewis Strauss, and Senators Bourke B. Hickenlooper and Arthur Vandenberg, coupled with security concerns aroused by the 2 February 1950 arrest of the British physicist Klaus Fuchs as an atomic spy, resulted in the proposal being dropped.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: Gemma Doyle, the series' protagonist, is forced to leave India after the death of her mother to attend a private boarding school in London.
On her sixteenth birthday, Gemma and her mother stroll through the Bombay market when they encounter a man and his younger brother. The man relays an unknown message to Gemma's mother about a woman named Circe, and Gemma's mother panics and demands that Gemma return home. Angry at her mother's secrecy, Gemma runs away, and has a vision of her mother committing suicide while searching for her, which she later learns is true. Gemma becomes haunted with the images of her mother's death.
With her mother dead and her father's addiction to laudanum growing stronger, Gemma's family ships her off to a finishing school in London: Spence Academy for Young Ladies. At first, Gemma is an outcast at the school; however, she soon finds the most popular and influential girl in school, Felicity, in a compromising situation that would ruin Felicity's life. Gemma agrees not to tell Felicity's secret and the girls soon form a strong friendship, along with Gemma's roommate Ann, and Felicity's best friend, Pippa. But Gemma is still tormented with her visions and is warned by the young man she had met in the market, Kartik, a member of an ancient group of men known as the Rakshana, dating all the way back to Charlemagne, that she must close her mind to these visions or something horrible will happen.

Passage: Annie, Marisa, and Kelly are three rowdy, raunchy, and rebellious best friends determined not to take crap from anyone and always have each other's backs. On the last day of freshman year, they sneak into the seniors party in the woods and throw eggs at three mean girls before running off. Exhilarated, the three vow to open their college acceptance letters together at their own epic senior bash in four years.
Years later, it is now the last day of the girls senior year of high school. Annie and Marisa are still best friends, but Kelly has stopped talking to both of them and is now the most popular girl in school. Each of them receives a letter from a different university - Annie, a talented cellist with excellent grades, receives a letter from Cornell; Marisa, who is unmotivated and didn't apply to any colleges until the last minute, receives a letter from Fresno State University; while Kelly gets a letter from Stanford, pleasing her overbearing mother. Annie is determined to keep the friends promise and open the letters at the senior party, but Marisa, bitter over Kelly cutting them out of her life, is annoyed by Annie constantly talking about the pact. Meanwhile, Kelly remembers how the school guidance counselor only signed her application to Stanford on the terms that Kelly would honor her pact with Annie and Marisa after Annie wrote about their friendship for her personal essay. Kelly, who seems to regret joining the popular girls, attempts to talk to Annie and Marisa, but the other popular girls bully them and ruin her attempt at conversation.

Passage: Upon receiving a key from her Uncle Max, Cabella travels to Italy where she discovers the key is related to a house named Cabella near a village. While traveling she stops near a waterfall to swim and loses the key, but a mysterious man returns the key. She then travels to the village, finds the house, and uses the key to open it.
The next day she goes to the market where the mysterious man works and learns from his cousin Maria that his name is Leo and he is deaf and mute. Maria and Cabella become friends and Maria introduces her sisters Sophia and Giulia. Later that evening Maria tells Cabella that she has a crush on Lord Jai, a rich man from India that attended a boarding school. That night, Cabella has a conversation with a spirit named Angelo and has strange dreams about her mother.
The next morning, Cabella finds a basket with goods such as eggs and apples sent by Leo. Maria then takes Cabella to her sister Ambrosia's funeral because she died from a heart attack. That night Angelo visits her and confesses that she must go to the cemetery to learn more information. At the cemetery, she meets Senior Bronzini, who, according to rumors, had a relationship with a nun when he was younger. Cabella decides to leave flowers for Chiara, a woman buried next to Ambrosia who has no flowers.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: Public transport in the city consists primarily of a First West of England bus network. Other providers are Abus, Stagecoach West, Stagecoach South West and Wessex Bus. Bristol's bus service has been criticised as unreliable and expensive, and in 2005 FirstGroup was fined for delays and safety violations.Although the city council has included a light rail system in its local transport plan since 2000, it has not yet funded the project; Bristol was offered European Union funding for the system, but the Department for Transport did not provide the required additional funding. The most recent light rail proposal was put forward as part of a consultation produced by the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership in November 2016, outlining potential light rail/tram routes from the city centre to Bristol Airport, the eastern and north west fringes of the city, and a route along the A4 road to Bath. In 2017, a further feasibility study will be undertaken into the possibility of an underground light rail system.A new bus rapid transit system (BRT) called MetroBus, is currently under construction across Bristol, as of 2018, to provide a faster and more reliable service than buses, improve transport infrastructure and reduce congestion. The MetroBus rapid transit scheme will run on both bus lanes and segregated guided busways on three routes; North Fringe to Hengrove (route m1), Ashton Vale to Bristol Temple Meads (route m2), and Emersons Green to The Centre (route m3). MetroBus services started in 2018.Three park and ride sites serve Bristol.
The city centre has water transport operated by Bristol Ferry Boats, Bristol Packet Boat Trips and Number Seven Boat Trips, providing leisure and commuter service in the harbour.

Passage: Bristol, the largest city in South West England, has an eclectic combination of architectural styles, ranging from the medieval to 20th century brutalism and beyond. During the mid-19th century, Bristol Byzantine, an architectural style unique to the city, was developed, and several examples have survived.
Buildings from most of the architectural periods of the United Kingdom can be seen throughout Bristol. Parts of the fortified city and castle date back to the medieval era, as do some churches dating from the 12th century onwards. Outside the historical city centre there are several large Tudor mansions built for wealthy merchants. Almshouses and public houses of the same period survive, intermingled with areas of more recent development. Several Georgian-era squares were laid out for the enjoyment of the middle class. As the city grew, it merged with its surrounding villages, each with its own character and centre, often clustered around a parish church.
The construction of the city's Floating Harbour, taking in the wharves on the River Avon and Frome, provided a focus for industrial development and the growth of the local transport infrastructure. Key elements of which include the Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed Clifton Suspension Bridge and Temple Meads terminus; the latter served from 2002 to 2009 as the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, but is now closed.The 20th century saw further expansion of the city, the growth of the University of Bristol and the arrival of the aircraft industry. During World War II, the city centre was extensively bombed in the Bristol Blitz. The redevelopment of shopping centres, office buildings, and the harbourside continues to this day.

Passage: Bristol has two major institutions of higher education: the University of Bristol, a redbrick chartered in 1909, and the University of the West of England, opened as Bristol Polytechnic in 1969, which became a university in 1992. The University of Law also has a campus in the city. Bristol has two further education institutions (City of Bristol College and South Gloucestershire and Stroud College) and two theological colleges: Trinity College, and Bristol Baptist College. The city has 129 infant, junior and primary schools,17 secondary schools, and three learning centres. After a section of north London, Bristol has England's second-highest number of independent school places. Independent schools in the city include Clifton College, Clifton High School, Badminton School, Bristol Grammar School, Queen Elizabeth's Hospital (the only all-boys school) and the Redmaids' School (founded in 1634 by John Whitson, which claims to be England's oldest girls' school).
In 2005 Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown named Bristol one of six English "science cities",
and a £300 million science park was planned at Emersons Green. Research is conducted at the two universities, the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Southmead Hospital, and science outreach is practiced at We The Curious, the Bristol Zoo, the Bristol Festival of Nature and the Create Centre.The city has produced a number of scientists, including 19th-century chemist Humphry Davy (who worked in Hotwells). Physicist Paul Dirac (from Bishopston) received the 1933 Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum mechanics. Cecil Frank Powell was the Melvill Wills Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol when he received the 1950 Nobel Prize for, among other discoveries, his photographic method of studying nuclear processes. Colin Pillinger was the planetary scientist behind the Beagle 2 project, and neuropsychologist Richard Gregory founded the Exploratory (a hands-on science centre which was the predecessor of At-Bristol/We The Curious).Initiatives such as the Flying Start Challenge encourage an interest in science and engineering in Bristol secondary-school pupils; links with aerospace companies impart technical information and advance student understanding of design.
The Bloodhound SSC project to break the land speed record is based at the Bloodhound Technology Centre on the city's harbourside.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: During the Blitz, Charlie, Carrie, and Paul are evacuated from London to Pepperinge Eye, where they are placed in the reluctant care of Miss Eglantine Price, who agrees to the arrangement temporarily. The three children attempt to run back to London, but after observing Miss Price attempting to fly on a broomstick, they change their minds. Miss Price reveals she is learning witchcraft through a correspondence school with hopes of using her spells in the British war effort, and offers the children a transportation spell in exchange for their silence. She casts the spell on a bedknob, and adds only Paul can work the spell, since he's the one who handed it to her.
Later, Miss Price receives a letter from her school announcing its closure, thus preventing her from learning the final spell. She convinces Paul to use the enchanted bed to return the group to London, and locate Professor Emelius Browne. They discover Browne is actually a charismatic showman who created the course from an old book, and is surprised to learn the spells actually work for Miss Price. He gives the book to Miss Price, who is distraught to discover the final spell, "Substitutiary Locomotion," is missing.
The group travels to Portobello Road to locate the rest of the book. They are approached by Swinburne, who takes them to the Bookman, who possesses the remainder of the book. They exchange their pieces, but learn only the spell was inscribed on a medallion, the Star of Astaroth, that belonged to a sorcerer of that name. The Bookman reveals the medallion may have been taken by a pack of wild animals, given anthropomorphism by Astaroth, to a remote island called Naboombu.
It was said in the 17th century, a lascar claimed he saw Naboombu. The Bookman, however, does not believe the island exists, as he looked in every chart for it, until Paul confirms its existence via a storybook.

Passage: After the Wicked Witch of the West is melted by a bucket of water, and Dorothy is sent back to her world, Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, decides to revive the Wicked Witch and remove her powers by storing them in a magic broom. Glinda then gives the magical broom to Dorothy's friends, Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow, and they become the guardians of the broom.
Evilene, the Wicked Witch, conspires with her Flying Monkeys to retrieve her broom. However, a friendly little monkey named Ozzy forgets to close the gate of the castle and a battle ensues between the flying monkeys and the 'Bums of Oz.' Evilene retrieves her broom and repels the Champions of Oz from the castle. She then punishes Ozzy's father, transforming him into a chicken. Angered by the witch's spell on his father, Ozzy steals the broom from Evilene and runs away from the palace.
Ozzy reaches Glinda to find she has been paralyzed by accidentally drinking a magic potion created by her niece Gabby, who is unable to create an antidote without a vital ingredient based on wood. Gabby and Ozzy set off to find the Champions of Oz. They are pursued by the other Flying Monkeys.
They soon find Cowardly Lion, who is out of sorts due to the witch's spell, but with some effort they guide him to the north town, where they find the Tin Woodman, who is extremely depressed by the spell. The spell-raged Lion smashes the Tin Man to bits, but calms down when Ozzy accidentally hits him with the magic broom.
Ozzy, Gaby, and the Cowardly Lion take the Tin Man's parts to the Library of Oz where (due to the spell) Scarecrow is obsessively reading books in an effort to become more intelligent. He quickly repairs Tin with the help from a clue. However, the group is attacked by the Flying Monkeys, and in the chaos Ozzy cures Scarecrow of the spell's effects, but they are unable to save Gabby from being whisked away by the Flying Monkeys.

Passage: By April 1917 Heseltine had again tired of London life. He returned to Cornwall where he rented a small cottage near the Lawrences, and made a partial peace with the writer. By the summer of 1917, as Allied fortunes in the war stagnated, Heseltine's military exemption came under review; to forestall a possible conscription, in August 1917 he moved to Ireland, taking Puma, with whom he had decided he was, after all, in love.In Ireland Heseltine combined studies of early music with a fascination for Celtic languages, withdrawing for a two-month period to a remote island where Irish was spoken exclusively. Another preoccupation was an increasing fascination with magical and occult practices, an interest first awakened during his Oxford year and revived in Cornwall. A letter to Robert Nichols indicates that at this time he was  "tamper[ing] ... with the science vulgarly known as Black Magic". To his former tutor Colin Taylor, Heseltine enthused about books "full of the most astounding wisdom and illumination"; these works included Eliphas Levi's History of Transcendental Magic, which includes procedures for the invocation of demons. These diversions did not prevent Heseltine from participating in Dublin's cultural life. He met W.B. Yeats, a fellow-enthusiast for the occult, and briefly considered writing an opera based on the 9th-century Celtic folk-tale of Liadain and Curithir. The composer Denis ApIvor has indicated that Heseltine's obsession with the occult was eventually replaced by his studies in religious philosophies, to which he was drawn through membership of a theosophist group in Dublin. Heseltine's interest in this field had originally been aroused by Kaikhosru Sorabji, the composer who had introduced him to the music of Béla Bartók.On 12 May 1918 Heseltine delivered a well-received illustrated lecture, "What Music Is", at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, which included musical excerpts from Bartók, the French composer Paul Ladmirault, and Van Dieren. Heseltine's championing of Van Dieren's music led in August 1918 to a vituperative war of words with the music publisher Winthrop Rogers, over the latter's rejection of several Van Dieren compositions. This dispute stimulated Heseltine's own creative powers, and in his final two weeks in Ireland he wrote ten songs, which later critics have considered  to be  among his finest work.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: The Esquisses of 1861 are a set of highly varied miniatures, ranging from the tiny 18-bar no. 4, Les cloches (The Bells), to the strident tone clusters of no. 45, Les diablotins (The Imps), and closing with a further evocation of church bells in no. 49, Laus Deo (Praise God). They were preceded in publication by Alkan's deceptively titled Sonatine, Op. 61, in 'classical' format, but a work of "ruthless economy [which] although it plays for less than twenty minutes ... is in every way a major work."Two of Alkan's substantial works from this period are musical paraphrases of literary works. Salut, cendre du pauvre, Op. 45 (1856), follows a section of the poem La Mélancolie by Gabriel-Marie Legouvé; while Super flumina Babylonis, Op. 52 (1859), is a blow-by-blow recreation in music of the emotions and prophecies of Psalm 137 ("By the waters of Babylon ..."). This piece is prefaced by a French version of the psalm which is believed to be the sole remnant of Alkan's Bible translation. Alkan's lyrical side was displayed in this period by the five sets of Chants inspired by Mendelssohn, which appeared between 1857 and 1872, as well as by a number of minor pieces.
Alkan's publications for organ or pédalier commenced with his Benedictus, Op. 54 (1859). In the same year he published a set of very spare and simple preludes in the eight Gregorian modes (1859, without opus number), which, in Smith's opinion, "seem to stand outside the barriers of time and space", and which he believes reveal "Alkan's essential spiritual modesty." These were followed by pieces such as the 13 Prières (Prayers), Op. 64 (1865), and the Impromptu sur le Choral de Luther "Un fort rempart est notre Dieu" , op. 69 (1866). Alkan also issued a book of 12 studies for the pedalboard alone (no opus number, 1866) and the Bombardo-carillon for pedalboard duet (four feet) of 1872.Alkan's return to the concert platform at his Petits Concerts, however, marked the end of his publications; his final work to be issued was the Toccatina, Op. 75, in 1872.

Passage: See also: FP (Catalogue of compositions), List of compositionsPoulenc's music is essentially diatonic. In Henri Hell's view, this is because the main feature of Poulenc's musical art is his melodic gift. In the words of Roger Nichols in the Grove dictionary, "For [Poulenc] the most important element of all was melody and he found his way to a vast treasury of undiscovered tunes within an area that had, according to the most up-to-date musical maps, been surveyed, worked and exhausted." The commentator George Keck writes, "His melodies are simple, pleasing, easily remembered, and most often emotionally expressive."Poulenc said that he was not inventive in his harmonic language. The composer Lennox Berkeley wrote of him, "All through his life, he was content to use conventional harmony, but his use of it was so individual, so immediately recognizable as his own, that it gave his music freshness and validity."  Keck considers Poulenc's harmonic language "as beautiful, interesting and personal as his melodic writing ... clear, simple harmonies moving in obviously defined tonal areas with chromaticism that is rarely more than passing". Poulenc had no time for musical theories; in one of his many radio interviews he called for "a truce to composing by theory, doctrine, rule!" He was dismissive of what he saw as the dogmatism of latter-day adherents to dodecaphony, led by René Leibowitz, and greatly regretted that the adoption of a theoretical approach had affected the music of Olivier Messiaen, of whom he had earlier had high hopes. To Hell, almost all Poulenc's music is "directly or indirectly inspired by the purely melodic associations of the human voice". Poulenc was a painstaking craftsman, though a myth grew up – "la légende de facilité" – that his music came easily to him; he commented, "The myth is excusable, since I do everything to conceal my efforts."The pianist Pascal Rogé commented in 1999 that both sides of Poulenc's musical nature were equally important: "You must accept him as a whole. If you take away either part, the serious or the non-serious, you destroy him. If one part is erased you get only a pale photocopy of what he really is." Poulenc recognised the dichotomy, but in all his works he wanted music that was "healthy, clear and robust – music as frankly French as Stravinsky's is Slav".

Passage: Elgar is probably best known for the first of the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, which were composed between 1901 and 1930. It is familiar to millions of television viewers all over the world every year who watch the Last Night of the Proms, where it is traditionally performed. When the theme of the slower middle section (technically called the "trio") of the first march came into his head, he told his friend Dora Penny, "I've got a tune that will knock 'em – will knock 'em flat". When the first march was played in 1901 at a London Promenade Concert, it was conducted by Henry J. Wood, who later wrote that the audience "rose and yelled ... the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore." To mark the coronation of Edward VII, Elgar was commissioned to set A. C. Benson's Coronation Ode for a gala concert at the Royal Opera House in June 1901. The approval of the king was confirmed, and Elgar began work. The contralto Clara Butt had persuaded him that the trio of the first Pomp and Circumstance march could have words fitted to it, and Elgar invited Benson to do so. Elgar incorporated the new vocal version into the Ode. The publishers of the score recognised the potential of the vocal piece, "Land of Hope and Glory", and asked Benson and Elgar to make a further revision for publication as a separate song. It was immensely popular and is now considered an unofficial British national anthem. In the United States, the trio, known simply as "Pomp and Circumstance" or "The Graduation March", has been adopted since 1905 for virtually all high school and university graduations.In March 1904 a three-day festival of Elgar's works was presented at Covent Garden, an honour never before given to any English composer. The Times commented, "Four or five years ago if any one had predicted that the Opera-house would be full from floor to ceiling for the performance of an oratorio by an English composer he would probably have been supposed to be out of his mind." The king and queen attended the first concert, at which Richter conducted The Dream of Gerontius, and returned the next evening for the second, the London premiere of The Apostles (first heard the previous year at the Birmingham Festival). The final concert of the festival, conducted by Elgar, was primarily orchestral, apart for an excerpt from Caractacus and the complete Sea Pictures (sung by Clara Butt). The orchestral items were Froissart, the Enigma Variations, Cockaigne, the first two (at that time the only two) Pomp and Circumstance marches, and the premiere of a new orchestral work, In the South, inspired by a holiday in Italy.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question: Passage: In 1979, the locomotive was renumbered "1881", painted black with silver stripes, and leased to a Hollywood company for use in the filming of the horror movie Terror Train (1979), starring Jamie Lee Curtis. In 1980, the locomotive was repainted with a color scheme used by Canadian Pacific in the 1930s.  The black, gold, and Tuscan red paint job was popular with railroad enthusiasts and photographers.  The number 1293 was also restored to the engine.  In February 1982, the headlights, handrails, and cab roof of 1293 were damaged when the roof of a Steamtown storage building gave way to heavy snow.Although the Steamtown Special History Study reasoned that, since this type of locomotive had historically operated in New England, perhaps as far south as Boston, it qualified to be part of the federal government's collection, the Canadian native sat unused for 12 years following the move to Scranton. Ohio Central Railroad System purchased it in 1996, and it underwent a 13-month restoration.  As of July 2010, Ohio Central Railroad has lost control of most of its holdings, but former owner, Jerry Joe Jacobson, maintained a collection of vintage equipment including CPR 1293 and her sister, CRP 1278, which is also a veteran of Steamtown, U.S.A. operational locomotives. No. 1293 is still operational as of October 2011.Canadian Pacific Railway No. 1278, like her sister, CPR 1293, was also built by Canadian Locomotive Company in 1948, and is a type 4-6-2, class G5d light-weight "Pacific" locomotive.  It was purchased by Blount in May 1965, and renumbered 127.  Blount had planned to renumber all three of the series 1200 CRP locomotives in his collection from 1246, 1278, and 1293 to 124, 127 and 129 respectively, but 1278 was the only one of the three that underwent the change.  The new number remained on the locomotive from 1966 until 1973, when its former number was restored.  The locomotive was leased to the Cadillac and Lake City Railroad in Michigan from 1970 to 1971.  After some repair work, the locomotive was returned to Bellows Falls where it served on excursion runs. After moving to Scranton, CPR 1278 was traded to the Gettysburg Steam Railroad in Pennsylvania.

Passage: The first trains to run in Warren County operated on portions of the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway (later the Wabash Railroad) in 1856.  The railroad entered the county near Williamsport and was built westward, reaching the western border at State Line City by 1857.  West Lebanon was the only other settlement near the railroad's path, but the line bypassed it by about a mile; the town subsequently moved northward to be nearer the station.  In 1869 the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western Railway was built across Mound Township in the southern part of the county.  A few years later, in 1872, a branch of the Chicago, Danville and Vincennes Railroad (known as the "Pumpkin Vine Railroad") was built from Bismarck, Illinois, southeast through Warren County; it was built specifically to carry coal from the mines south of Covington.  A labor riot at the mines in the late 1870s interrupted the flow of coal, and this combined with the poor financial state of the railroad led to the removal of most of the track by 1880; the remaining portion was removed a few years later.  At about this time, in the early 1880s, the Chicago and Indiana Coal Railroad began operating a north–south line through the county.  It became part of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad but was abandoned in 1920 due to financial difficulties; a new company operated the line as the Chicago, Attica and Southern Railroad starting in 1921, but financial problems affected the new company as well and the rails were removed in 1946.  Another line, part of the New York Central Railroad, was built through the area in 1903; locally, it ran northeast from Danville into Warren County, then turned north through the small towns of Sloan and Stewart and continued north into Benton County.  In the 1970s it became part of Penn Central, then Conrail; operations on the line ceased in the 1990s and the tracks were removed, though a portion running north from Stewart remained and became the Bee Line Railroad which serves the grain processing facility in Stewart.The Wabash Cannonball was a passenger train that ran on the Wabash Railroad between Detroit, Michigan and Saint Louis, Missouri, starting in 1949.  On September 19, 1964, the southbound Cannonball struck a truck loaded with concrete blocks at a crossing in Johnsonville.  The driver of the truck was killed instantly, but although the train derailed, no other lives were lost.  On the train, the driver and fireman were severely injured when the engine caught fire, and about half of the 50 passengers were injured.  Over 1,000 feet (300 m) of track was torn out, and the damage was estimated at over $500,000.  The last run of the Cannonball was in 1969.After peaking in the late 19th century, the county's population declined during the 20th, in common with much of the rural Midwest. The widespread adoption of the automobile in the 1920s undercut small-town businesses, which were threatened further by the Great Depression of the 1930s.  World War II and the economic revival of the late 1940s and 1950s drew people to better jobs in growing regional cities, and this further diminished small towns.  The population shrank again in the 1980s due largely to the effects of the "farm crisis" of low crop prices, high farmer debt and other economic causes.The first county fair involved both Fountain and Warren counties and was held in Independence on September 6 and 7, 1853.  In following years, the fair was held in Fountain County, and participation by Warren County farmers diminished.  In 1856, farmers in the northern part of the county held a fair just east of Pine Village, and this continued each year through 1864.  West Lebanon became the next site of the county fair, and it ran successfully through 1883; the fairgrounds just to the northwest of town were well-developed.  Later, the fair was held at the county seat of Williamsport, and this continues through the present day; it is now a 4H fair.One location in the county, near the small town of Kramer, once had an international reputation: the Hotel Mudlavia.  Built in 1890 at a cost of $250,000, it drew guests from around the world to nearby natural springs that were said to have healing qualities.  People such as James Whitcomb Riley, John L. Sullivan and Harry Lauder are known to have stayed at the hotel, which burned down in 1920.  Later, water from the springs was bottled and sold by Indianapolis-based Cameron Springs company, which was acquired by the Perrier Group of America in 2000 for about $10.5 million.  As of 2008 the water was still being sold and was marketed under a variety of names.

Passage: F. Nelson Blount was killed when his private airplane hit a tree during an emergency landing, in Marlboro, New Hampshire, on August 31, 1967. By that time a good deal of Blount's collection was controlled by the Steamtown Foundation and had been relocated to Bellows Falls. Blount owned several corporations and one, the Green Mountain Railroad (GMRC), controlled the tracks that lay between Walpole, Bellows Falls and Chester, Vermont, which Steamtown was to use for its excursions. When Blount died most of the controlling stock of the GMRC was transferred to the president of the railroad, Robert Adams.
Throughout its tenure in Vermont, Steamtown provided several types of excursions, primarily in the summer and during the peak foliage season of the autumn.  Occasionally, these trips would be lengthy, like one that ran from Boston to Montreal, or those that ran between Bellows Falls and Rutland, Vermont.  On a daily basis the excursions ran from Riverside station in Bellows Falls to Chester depot.  The cost of the trip, which in 1977 was $5.75 for an adult and $2.95 for a child, was combined with entrance into the museum, which was the grounds of Riverside station. The station was located about 2 miles (3 km) outside of town and was situated on the bank of the Connecticut River.  One newspaper travel writer, Bill Rice, described the 13-mile (21 km) trip from Riverside to Chester: "The trip to Chester affords a beautiful view of unspoiled Vermont countryside-covered bridges, vintage farms with grazing livestock and cornfield and a winding river with a deep gorge and picturesque waterfall." The river that Rice referred to was the Williams River, which crossed the route of the train seven times.  The waterfall was at Brockway Mills Gorge and was seen from a bridge 100 feet (30 m) above the gorge.  Rice also said that at the time he was writing, 1977, Steamtown had the largest collection of steam locomotives in the world.In 1971, the Board of Health of Vermont issued a waiver to the GMRC for Vermont's air pollution regulations.  The waiver permitted the operation of steam locomotive excursions between Steamtown's Riverside station at Bellows Falls, and Chester depot.  In 1974, as the state of Vermont prepared for its celebration of the country's bicentenary, in which the Steamtown excursion featured prominently, the subject of the air pollution regulations came up again.  The tourist attraction was operating on temporary permits that allowed it to operate excursions in Vermont.  By 1976, the relationship between Steamtown and GMRC deteriorated as the two organizations fought over maintenance of the tracks, which were owned by the state of Vermont.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question: Passage: Bach is believed to have written Christ lag in Todes Banden in 1707. He was a professional organist aged 22, employed from 1703 in Arnstadt as the organist of the New Church (which replaced the burned Bonifatiuskirche, today known as the Bach Church). At age 18, he had inspected the new organ built by Johann Friedrich Wender, was invited to play one Sunday, and was hired. The organ was built on the third tier of a theatre-like church. Bach's duties as a church musician involved some responsibility for choral music, but the exact year he began composing cantatas is unknown. Christ lag in Todes Banden is one of a small group of cantatas that survive from his early years. According to the musicologist Martin Geck, many details of the score reflect "organistic practice".In Arnstadt, the Kantor (church musician) Heindorff was responsible for church music in the Upper Church (Liebfrauenkirche), and the New Church where Bach was the organist. He typically conducted music in the Upper Church and would appoint a choir prefect for vocal music in the New Church. Wolff notes that "subjecting his works to the questionable leadership of a prefect" was not what Bach would have done. Therefore, most cantatas of the period are not for Sunday occasions, but restricted to special occasions such as weddings and funerals. Christ lag in Todes Banden is the only exception, but was most likely composed not for Arnstadt but for an application to a more important post at the Divi Blasii church in Mühlhausen.

Passage: Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten! (Ring out, you songs; sound, you strings!), BWV 172, in Weimar for Pentecost Sunday in 1714. Bach led the first performance on 20 May 1714 in the Schlosskirche, the court chapel in the ducal Schloss. Erschallet, ihr Lieder is an early work in a genre to which he later contributed complete cantata cycles for all occasions of the liturgical year.
Bach was appointed Konzertmeister in Weimar in the spring of 1714, a position that called for the performance of a church cantata each month. He composed Erschallet, ihr Lieder as the third cantata in the series, to a text probably written by court poet Salomon Franck. The text reflects different aspects of the Holy Spirit. The librettist included a quotation from the day's prescribed Gospel reading in the only recitative, and for the closing chorale he used a stanza from Philipp Nicolai's hymn "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern" (1599).
The work is in six movements, and scored for four vocal soloists, four-part choir, three trumpets, timpani, oboe, bassoon and a string orchestra of two violins, two violas, and basso continuo. The orchestra for the holiday occasion is festive compared to the two works previously composed in Weimar. The cantata opens with a chorus, followed by the recitative, in which words spoken by Jesus are sung by the bass as the vox Christi (voice of Christ). A bass aria with trumpets addresses the Trinity, and a tenor aria then describes the Spirit that was present at the Creation. This is followed by an intimate duet of the Soul (soprano) and the Spirit (alto), to which an oboe plays the ornamented melody of Martin Luther's hymn "Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott" and a solo cello provides the bass line. The theme of intimacy between God and Man is developed further in the following chorale, after which Bach specified an unusual repeat of the opening chorus.
While Bach served as Thomaskantor – director of church music – in Leipzig from 1723, he performed the cantata several times, sometimes in a different key and with changes in the scoring. Musicologists agree that he loved the cantata's Gospel text, "If ye love me ...", and the Pentecost hymn used in the duet, setting both the text and the hymn several times. John Eliot Gardiner writes that Bach "particularly valued" this cantata. It contains features that he used again in later compositions of cantatas, oratorios and his masses, for example movements with three trumpets and timpani in a triple meter for festive occasions, and duets as a symbol of God and man.

Passage: Bach is known as a prolific composer of cantatas. When he assumed the position as Thomaskantor (director of church music) in Leipzig in 1723, he began the project to write church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year – Sundays and feast days – a project that he pursued for three years.Bach was appointed organist and chamber musician in Weimar at the court of the co-reigning dukes in Saxe-Weimar, Wilhelm Ernst and his nephew Ernst August on 25 June 1708. He had composed sacred cantatas before, some during his tenure in Mühlhausen from 1706 to 1708. Most were written for special occasions and were based mainly on biblical texts and hymns. Examples include: Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 131; the early chorale cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4 for Easter; Gott ist mein König, BWV 71, to celebrate the inauguration of the new city council on 4 February 1708; and the Actus Tragicus for a funeral.
In Weimar, Bach first concentrated on the organ, composing major works for the instrument, including the Orgelbüchlein, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, and the Prelude and Fugue in E major, BWV 566. Christoph Wolff suggests that Bach may have studied musical material belonging to the Hofkapelle, ("court capelle" or court orchestra), and that he copied and studied works by Johann Philipp Krieger, Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann, Marco Giuseppe Peranda and Johann David Heinichen in the period from 1711 to 1713. In early 1713 Bach composed his first cantatas in the new style that included recitatives and arias: the so-called Hunting Cantata, BWV 208, as a homage cantata for Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, celebrated on 23 February, and possibly the church cantata for Sexagesima (the second Sunday before Lent) Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt, BWV 18, on a text by Erdmann Neumeister.In 1713, he was asked to apply for the position of music director of the Marktkirche in Halle, succeeding Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow. Zachow had taught the young George Frideric Handel, and  composed many church cantatas in the new style, adopting recitatives and arias from the Italian opera. Bach was successful in his application for the position, but declined after Duke Wilhelm Ernst increased his salary and offered him a promotion.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: Warlock is a small Utah mining town of the early 1880s. Cowboys working for Abe McQuown often come into town to shoot the place up, kill on just a whim, beating or humiliating any sheriff who tries to stand up to them. The Citizens' Committee decides to hire Clay Blaisedell, a renowned gunfighter, as town marshal in spite of the misgivings of some, such as old Judge Holloway who insists that the situation should be handled within the law (though a loophole prevents it from being done effectively).
Blaisedell, famous for his golden-handled revolvers, arrives in Warlock with his devoted friend, Tom Morgan, his club-footed, right-hand man, who is no slouch with a gun himself. Morgan has a reputation as a heavy-drinking gambler, but Blaisedell insists that Morgan is part of the package. They even take over the local saloon and rename it the "French Palace" (something they appear to have done in previous towns, since they bring the signboard with them).
Their first encounter with McQuown's men is without bloodshed. The cowboys are intimidated by Blaisedell and one, Johnny Gannon, stays behind. Gannon has been put off by their propensity for killing, particularly the shooting of victims in the back, for some time now and resolves to be more law-abiding.
Morgan learns that his old flame, Lily Dollar, is coming to town on the stagecoach, and she is accompanied by Bob Nicholson, brother of Big Ben Nicholson, who was recently killed by Blaisedell. Lily had left Morgan for Big Ben and knows that Morgan pushed Ben into challenging Blaisedell, who killed him as a result. She wants Blaisedell dead to punish Morgan.
Morgan sets out to meet the stagecoach but it is robbed by some of McQuown's cowboys as he watches from a distance. He takes advantage of the situation to kill Bob Nicholson unseen. Lily arrives in town and sees Morgan there. She believes that he pulled the trigger, although this is based on intuition rather than evidence.

Passage: Charlie Snow was a highly decorated war hero, a sniper who never placed emotion before the mission. Except once. Providing cover for an undercover arms dealer sting operation, he was forced into a predicament, as through his scope he saw a hostage crisis unfold.
The decision he made cost his fellow soldiers their lives. But he also managed to kill the hostage-taker, arms dealer Lendl Bodnar.
Back in the USA, Charlie is now a shell of the man he used to be. He has been ostracized from the government, and his family is falling apart. His wife Maggie is close to finalizing their split.
But Charlie's world is about to get rocked. Lendl Bodnar has a brother named Yevon Bodnar, an arms dealer who wants revenge on Charlie for Lendl's death.
Charlie's learns that Maggie has been kidnapped, his daughter Lisa and son Sam are in danger.  Everywhere he turns, he's being attacked by Yevon's men.
Charlie must summon all the tactics that made him such an effective killer and reconnect with his secret ops government links to rescue Maggie and take Yevon down.

Passage: In Bridger's Wells, Nevada in 1885, Art Croft and Gil Carter ride into town and enter Darby's Saloon. The atmosphere is subdued due to recent incidents of cattle-rustling. Art and Gil are suspected to be rustlers because they have rarely been seen in town.
A man enters the saloon and announces that a rancher named Larry Kinkaid has been murdered. The townspeople immediately form a posse to pursue the murderers, who they believe are cattle rustlers. A judge tells the posse that it must bring the suspects back for trial, and that its formation by a deputy (the sheriff being out of town) is illegal. Art and Gil join the posse to avoid raising even more suspicion. Davies, who was initially opposed to forming the posse, also joins, along with "Major" Tetley and his son Gerald. Poncho informs the posse that three men and cattle bearing Kinkaid's brand have just entered Bridger's Pass.
The posse encounters a stagecoach. When they try to stop it, the stagecoach guard assumes that it is a stickup, and shoots, wounding Art. In the coach are Rose Mapen, Gil's ex-girlfriend, and her new husband, Swanson.
Later that night in Ox-Bow Canyon, the posse finds three men sleeping, with what are presumed to be stolen cattle nearby. The posse interrogates them: a young, well-spoken man, Donald Martin; a Mexican, Juan Martínez; and an old man, Alva Hardwicke (Francis Ford, brother of film director John Ford). Martin claims that he purchased the cattle from Kinkaid but received no bill of sale. No one believes Martin, and the posse decides to hang the three men at sunrise.
Martin writes a letter to his wife and asks Davies, the only member of the posse that he trusts, to deliver it. Davies reads the letter, and, hoping to save Martin's life, shows it to the others. Davies believes that Martin is innocent and does not deserve to die.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: Richie Donovan works as a professional thief for Groznyi, a wealthy businessman, to pay off his debt for being smuggled into the U.S. as a child. He pulls off an initially successful diamond heist, but it is botched when he is involved in two separate car accidents. He is given one last chance to pay off his debt by going to Russia to steal a priceless antique cross, locked in a safe in a Moscow penthouse apartment. Richie and his Russian accomplices, brothers Peter and Yuri, recover the cross; but their elevator becomes stuck on the uncompleted 13th floor. Believing the police have stopped the elevator, the thieves take their fellow passengers hostage to negotiate an escape. They agree to send one hostage down; but, when the elevator doors open on the ground floor, the hostage has mysteriously been beheaded.
The remaining hostages quickly divide into two groups: a Christian group consisting of Sonya, Helena and Katerina, who are later joined by Yuri, and another group consisting of nerdy Dmitry, beautiful Anna, and incompetent security guard Boris.
In the confusion, the Christian group seizes firearms and takes control, shooting Peter. Katerina is sent to stand guard over Richie and the remainder of the hostages, while Sonya takes Yuri to a chamber where he is to sacrificed by a wild man in armor named Alex. Yuri escapes, but he is impaled by one of Alex's traps, complete with disco music and lighting. In his rage, Alex kills Katerina, allowing Richie and the hostages to escape. They discover Alex's lair, where he has been watching everyone using security cameras. A photo reveals that Alex is the twin brother of Sonya, and they both believe themselves to be descendants of Ivan the Terrible. The group splits when Richie and Anna decide to chase after Alex, while Boris and Dmitry prefer to rig the room with various traps they have constructed and wait for Alex to come to them.

Passage: Taxi driver Joe Lourik gets into an argument with a finance company over payments owed on his new cab. Believing that he has been cheated, Joe reclaims his payments but is arrested for robbery. Escaping with a pair of handcuffs still attached, he jumps on a passing freight train where he meets a tramp who tells him to see Patian, a thief and a fence in San Diego, who can also remove his handcuffs. After meeting Patian, it is agreed that he will remove the cuffs on the condition that Joe drive the getaway car for a bank robbery. After the robbery, Patian sends Joe north to a boarding house in Sacramento to wait for his share of the take, but the boarding house owner informs Joe that Patian isn't good for the money.
Desperate for bus fare to return to San Diego to get his money from Patian, Joe considers robbing the cash register of the empty storefront of a downtown Sacramento flower shop. Once in the store, clerk Laura Benson emerges from the backroom before Joe can rob the register. Joe falls in love immediately and decides to go straight. With his winnings from a crap game, Joe buys a garage in Amesville and settles down, however, within a year, the police are on his trail. Joe then travels to San Diego to demand his money from Patian, but Patian's thugs force Joe to rob a post office. Desperate, and afraid that he will be caught if he returns home, Joe disappears.
Some time later, Joe sees a picture of his newborn baby in the newspaper and meets with Laura, who pleads with Joe to give himself up and serve his time so that he can continue his new life. Hearing footsteps, Joe flees from the police who have followed Laura, and Laura is arrested and jailed as an accomplice.

Passage: Alex Gates is a wine merchant living in Miami who has distanced himself from his alcoholic wife Suzanne with his philandering, and from his stepson Jason with his indifference. Alex is heavily in debt, and hatches a plan to steal a valuable diamond necklace from the house of his clients, the Reese family, where his Cuban mistress Gabriela works. He cases the house during a wine delivery with Jason, who works in Alex's business, although not happily. Jason becomes attracted to Gabriela, unaware of her relationship with his father.
On the day of the heist, Alex and his British safe-cracker partner Victor arrive at the house under the pretense that the Reeses' wine cellar needs repairs, otherwise their wine will be ruined. Gabriela was supposed to let them in, but she was fired the day before. Fortunately, Alex had cultivated a relationship with the security guard and is able to convince him to admit them. Victor sends Alex and the guard off on an errand while he works on the safe, but a second guard becomes suspicious, although Victor is able to complete the job before being discovered.
The pair decide that Alex will pawn the necklace in New York City, and he invites Gabriela to go with him. As he is packing, Suzanne chances upon the airline tickets for him and Gabriela and immediately realizes he is having another affair. The two of them get into a physical alteration and she knocks him out. Deciding to leave him, she empties out his suitcase, where he has hidden the necklace, and uses it for her own clothes. Jason walks in and the two of them flee to the Florida Keys. Upon arriving, they discover the necklace, but Suzanne doesn't want to keep it, even after Jason has it appraised, discovering it is worth $1 million. Jason also visits Gabriela back in Miami, giving her the phone number of the place they are staying at.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question: Passage: Half of Minneapolis–Saint Paul residents work in the city where they live. Most residents drive cars, but 60% of the 160,000 people working downtown commute by means other than a single person per auto. The Metropolitan Council's Metro Transit, which operates the light rail system and most of the city's buses, provides free travel vouchers through the Guaranteed Ride Home program to allay fears that commuters might otherwise be occasionally stranded if, for example, they work late hours.On January 1, 2011, the city's limit of 343 taxis was lifted.Minneapolis currently has two light rail lines and one commuter rail line. The METRO Blue Line LRT (formerly the Hiawatha Line) serves 34,000 riders daily and connects the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and Mall of America in Bloomington to downtown. Most of the line runs at surface level, although parts of the line run on elevated tracks (including the Franklin Avenue and Lake Street/Midtown stations) and approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) of the line runs underground, including the Lindbergh terminal subway station at the airport.

Passage: As of the 2010 U.S. census, the racial composition was as follows:
White: 63.8%
Black or African American: 18.6%
American Indian: 2.0%
Asian: 5.6% (1.9% Hmong, 0.9% Chinese, 0.7% Indian, 0.6% Korean, 0.4% Vietnamese, 0.3% Thai, 0.3% Laotian, 0.2% Filipino, 0.1% Japanese, 0.2% Other Asian)
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.1%
Other: 5.6%
Multiracial: 4.4%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race): 10.5% (7.0% Mexican, 1.3% Ecuadorian, 0.4% Puerto Rican, 0.3% Guatemalan, 0.2% Salvadoran, 1.3% Other Latino)White Americans make up about three-fifths of Minneapolis's population. This community is predominantly of German and Scandinavian descent. There are 82,870 German Americans in the city, making up over one-fifth (23.1%) of the population. The Scandinavian-American population is primarily Norwegian and Swedish. There are 39,103 Norwegian Americans, making up 10.9% of the population; there are 30,349 Swedish Americans, making up 8.5% of the city's population. Danish Americans are not nearly as numerous; there are 4,434 Danish Americans, making up only 1.3% of the population. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish Americans together make up 20.7% of the population. This means that ethnic Germans and Scandinavians together make up 43.8% of Minneapolis's population, and make up the majority of Minneapolis's non-Hispanic white population. Other significant European groups in the city include those of Irish (11.3%), English (7.0%), Polish (3.9%), French (3.5%) and Italian (2.3%) descent. African Americans make up 18.6% of the city's population, with a large fraction hailing from Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Gary, Indiana over the past three decades.
There are 10,711 individuals who identify as multiracial in Minneapolis: People of black and white ancestry number at 3,551, and make up 1.0% of the population. People of white and Native American ancestry number at 2,319, and make up 0.6% of the population. Those of white and Asian ancestry number at 1,871, and make up 0.5% of the population. Lastly, people of black and Native American ancestry number at 885, and make up 0.2% of Minneapolis's population.

Passage: Minnesota is known for a politically active citizenry, and populism has been a long-standing force among the state's political parties. Minnesota has a consistently high voter turnout. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, 78.2% of eligible Minnesotans voted—the highest percentage of any U.S. state—versus the national average of 61.2%. Voters can register on election day at their polling places with evidence of residency.Hubert Humphrey brought national attention to the state with his address at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Minnesotans have consistently cast their Electoral College votes for Democratic presidential candidates since 1976, longer than any other state. Minnesota is the only state in the nation that did not vote for Ronald Reagan in either of his presidential runs. Minnesota has gone for the Democratic Party in every presidential election since 1960, with the exception of 1972, when it was carried by Republican Richard Nixon.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have major-party status in Minnesota, but its state-level "Democratic" party is actually a separate party, officially known as the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). It was formed out of a 1944 alliance of the Minnesota Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties.
The state has had active third-party movements. The Reform Party, now the Independence Party, was able to elect former mayor of Brooklyn Park and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura to the governorship in 1998. The Independence Party has received enough support to keep major-party status. The Green Party, while no longer having major-party status, has a large presence in municipal government, notably in Minneapolis and Duluth, where it competes directly with the DFL party for local offices. Major-party status in Minnesota (which grants state funding for elections) is reserved to parties whose candidates receive five percent or more of the vote in any statewide election (e.g., Governor, Secretary of State, U.S. President).
The state's U.S. Senate seats have generally been split since the early 1990s, and in the 108th and 109th Congresses, Minnesota's congressional delegation was split, with four representatives and one senator from each party. In the 2006 mid-term election, Democrats were elected to all state offices, except governor and lieutenant governor, where Republicans Tim Pawlenty and Carol Molnau narrowly won re-election. The DFL posted double-digit gains in both houses of the legislature, elected Amy Klobuchar to the U.S. Senate, and increased the party's U.S. House caucus by one. Keith Ellison (DFL) was elected as the first African American U.S. Representative from Minnesota, as well as the first Muslim elected to Congress nationwide. In 2008, DFLer and former comedian and radio talk show host Al Franken beat incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in the United States Senate race by 312 votes out of 3 million cast.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question: Passage: Apart from a single early work for unaccompanied choir ("Chanson à boire", 1922), Poulenc began writing choral music in 1936. In that year he produced three works for choir: Sept chansons (settings of verses by Éluard and others), Petites voix (for children's voices), and his religious work Litanies à la Vierge Noire, for female or children's voices and organ. The Mass in G major (1937) for unaccompanied choir is described by Gouverné as having something of a baroque style, with "vitality and joyful clamour on which his faith is writ large". Poulenc's new-found religious theme continued with Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence (1938–39), but among his most important choral works is the secular cantata Figure humaine (1943). Like the Mass, it is unaccompanied, and to succeed in performance it requires singers of the highest quality. Other a cappella works include the Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël (1952), which make severe demands on choirs' rhythmic precision and intonation.Poulenc's major works for choir and orchestra are the Stabat Mater (1950), the Gloria (1959–60), and Sept répons des ténèbres (Seven responsories for Tenebrae, 1961–62). All these works are based on liturgical texts, originally set to Gregorian chant. In the Gloria, Poulenc's faith expresses itself in an exuberant, joyful way, with intervals of prayerful calm and mystic feeling, and an ending of serene tranquillity. Poulenc wrote to Bernac in 1962, "I have finished Les Ténèbres. I think it is beautiful. With the Gloria and the Stabat Mater, I think I have three good religious works. May they spare me a few days in Purgatory, if I narrowly avoid going to hell." Sept répons des ténèbres, which Poulenc did not live to hear performed, uses a large orchestra, but in Nichols's view it displays a new concentration of thought. To the critic Ralph Thibodeau, the work may be considered as Poulenc's own requiem and is "the most avant-garde of his sacred compositions, the most emotionally demanding, and the most interesting musically, comparable only with his magnum opus sacrum, the opera, Dialogues des Carmélites.".

Passage: Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called objektivering ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.

Passage: Other works that followed continued the composer's new-found seriousness, including many settings of Éluard's surrealist and humanist poems. In 1937 he composed his first major liturgical work, the Mass in G major for soprano and mixed choir a cappella, which has become the most frequently performed of all his sacred works. Poulenc's new compositions were not all in this serious vein; his incidental music to the play La Reine Margot, starring Yvonne Printemps, was pastiche 16th-century dance music, and became popular under the title Suite française. Music critics generally continued to define Poulenc by his light-hearted works, and it was not until the 1950s that his serious side was widely recognised.In 1936 Poulenc began giving frequent recitals with Bernac. At the École Normale in Paris they gave the premiere of Poulenc's Cinq poèmes de Paul Éluard. They continued to perform together for more than twenty years, in Paris and internationally, until Bernac's retirement in 1959. Poulenc, who composed 90 songs for his collaborator, considered him one of the "three great meetings" of his professional career, the other two being Éluard and Landowska. In Johnson's words, "for twenty-five years Bernac was Poulenc's counsellor and conscience", and the composer relied on him for advice not only on song-writing, but on his operas and choral music.Throughout the decade, Poulenc was popular with British audiences; he established a fruitful relationship with the BBC in London, which broadcast many of his works. With Bernac, he made his first tour of Britain in 1938. His music was also popular in America, seen by many as "the quintessence of French wit, elegance and high spirits". In the last years of the 1930s, Poulenc's compositions continued to vary between serious and light-hearted works. Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence (Four Penitential Motets, 1938–39) and the song "Bleuet" (1939), an elegiac meditation on death, contrast with the song cycle Fiançailles pour rire (Light-Hearted Betrothal), which recaptures the spirit of Les biches, in the opinion of Hell.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question: Passage: The Doom Bar has accounted for more than 600 beachings, capsizes and wrecks since records began early in the nineteenth century, the majority of which are wrecks.Larger boats entering Padstow were offered assistance, generally by pilots who would wait at Stepper Point when a ship signalled it would be entering. If a boat was foundering, salvors would step in and help. There were cases where salvors attempted to overstate the danger in court, so as to extort more money from the owners. This happened to the brig The Towan, which foundered in October 1843 but was not in significant danger. Although it did not need assistance, salvors interfered and attempted to claim a large amount in compensation from the owner.In 1827, the recently founded Life-boat Institution helped fund a permanent lifeboat at Padstow, a 23 feet (7.0 m) rowing boat with four oars. The lifeboat house at Hawker's Cove was erected two years later by the Padstow Harbour Association for the Preservation of Life and Property from Shipwreck. Reverend Charles Prideaux-Brune of Prideaux Place was the patron. In 1879, four of his granddaughters and their friend were rowing on the Doom Bar and saw a craft go down. They rowed out to save the drowning sailor. As it was very unusual for women to rescue men all five girls received a Royal National Lifeboat Institution Silver Medal for their bravery.Despite the safer eastern channel and improvements in maritime technology, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution still deals with incidents at the Doom Bar. In February 1997, two fishermen who were not wearing lifejackets drowned after their boat capsized. Two anglers had been killed in a similar incident in 1994. On 25 June 2007, the Padstow lifeboat and a rescue helicopter rescued the crews of two yachts in separate incidents from the area.

Passage: Harvey Cheyne is the spoiled son of American business tycoon Frank Burton Cheyne. Harvey is shunned by his classmates at a private boarding school, and eventually suspended for bad behavior. His father therefore takes him on a business trip to Europe, travelling there by trans-Atlantic steamship. Mid passage, Harvey falls overboard in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. He is rescued by a Portuguese-American fisherman, Manuel Fidello, and taken aboard the fishing schooner "We're Here", from Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Harvey is shocked the schooner's captain, Disko Troop, intends fishing in the Atlantic for three more months. He fails to persuade the captain to take him back to New York nor can he convince him of his wealth; but Captain Disko offers Harvey temporary crew membership until they return to port. Harvey is reluctant to do real work but eventually accepts. Befriended by Captain Troop's son, Dan, he becomes acclimated to the demanding fishing lifestyle. The We're Here fills with fish they catch. When a prank of Harvey's causes a fish hook to lodge in a crewman's arm, Manuel defends the boy.

Passage: The end of Patience Camp was signalled on the evening of 8 April, when the floe suddenly split. The camp now found itself on a small triangular raft of ice; a break-up of this would mean disaster, so Shackleton readied the lifeboats for the party's enforced departure. He had now decided they would try, if possible, to reach the distant Deception Island because a small wooden church had been reportedly erected for the benefit of whalers. This could provide a source of timber that might enable them to construct a seaworthy boat.At 1 p.m. on 9 April, the Dudley Docker was launched, and an hour later all three boats were away. Shackleton himself commanded the James Caird, Worsley the Dudley Docker, and navigating officer Hubert Hudson was nominally in charge of the Stancomb Wills, though because of his precarious mental state the effective commander was Tom Crean.The boats were surrounded by ice, dependent upon leads of water opening up, and progress was perilous and erratic. Frequently the boats were tied to floes, or dragged up onto them, while the men camped and waited for conditions to improve. Shackleton was wavering again between several potential destinations, and on 12 April, rejected the various island options and decided on Hope Bay, at the very tip of Graham Land. However, conditions in the boats, in temperatures sometimes as low as −20 °F (−29 °C), with little food and regular soakings in icy seawater, were wearing the men down, physically and mentally. Shackleton therefore decided that Elephant Island, the nearest of the possible refuges, was now the most practical option.On 14 April, the boats lay off the south-east coast of Elephant Island, but could not land as the shore consisted of perpendicular cliffs and glaciers. Next day the James Caird rounded the eastern point of the island, to reach the northern lee shore, and discovered a narrow shingle beach. Soon afterwards, the three boats, which had been separated during the previous night, were reunited at this landing place. It was apparent from high tide markings that this beach would not serve as a long-term camp, so the next day Wild and a crew set off in the Stancomb Wills to explore the coast for a safer site. They returned with news of a long spit of land, seven miles (11 km) to the west. With minimum delay the men returned to the boats and transferred to this new location, which they later christened Cape Wild.

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: Gloria Fuentes is a Latin-American makeup artist from Los Angeles who goes on a trip to visit her best friend Suzu in Tijuana, Mexico.
When the pair go to a local night club, Suzu wants to impress to help her chances in a beauty competition she has entered. When Gloria goes to the bathroom, armed gunmen break in through the vents and attempt to kidnap Gloria out of her stall but ultimately give her time to escape while they attack the building. The next morning, Gloria is unable to get contact from Suzu and decides to ride with a police officer to try to find her. When the officer takes a break, Gloria is taken by members of the Las Estrellas gang, the same men who shot up the club.
The gang take her to their headquarters, where Lino, the boss, agrees to help her find her friend if she agrees to work for them. Gloria is reluctant but eventually agrees and is told to get into a car and park it on a corner. Gloria does the job, and when she leaves the car and joins the men at the top of the hill, they blow up the building, revealed to be a DEA Safehouse containing three agents.
Lino then sends Gloria to the Miss Baja California pageant, where she attempts an escape through the bathroom. Gloria escapes and encounters a DEA officer who takes her into custody and eventually lets her go but not before he puts a tracking device on her since the DEA are aiming to monitor Las Estrellas.
Gloria returns to the gang and is sent to San Diego with blood money and drugs attached to her car. Upon crossing the border Gloria is given an arsenal of guns to bring back to Mexico by a gangster named Jimmy, and then told to meet in a large parking lot. Gloria gets to the lot, and the men in Las Estrellas get their weapons. However the police show up, and Lino runs to seize Gloria but is shot in the leg, and Gloria helps him to safety.

Passage: The film shows a scene of a girl being kidnapped from a charity plane by Vietnamese rebels (a U.N. supplies [as in food and medicine] plane) in Vietnam.  Then we are taken to the United States to a detention center in Los Angeles where the warden of the center and 6 of the toughest prisoners are hired to rescue the girl, whose name is Gabrielle Presscott, daughter of Jameson Prescott, CEO and billionaire.  Warden Toliver and prisoners (by last name only, their first names are never revealed) Butts and Monster (black youths), Lopez and Vasquez (Latino youths, with Vasquez being a girl), and Brophy and Lamb (white youths). The group travels to Vietnam with three days to rescue Gabrielle, spending one day to train and the rest of the days to find her.
After winning a battle the group spends the night at a village brothel and has a small celebration, with Brophy sneaking away into the night.  The group awakens to find the rebels with Brophy as a hostage and asking the villagers to hand over the rest of the Americans.  The group decides to attempt a rescue for Brophy and are successful, however, Lopez and Monster are both killed during the fight. The group runs away into the jungle and is tiredly marching along when Lamb steps on a landmine.  While Toliver is trying to disarm the mine, some rebels are slowly getting nearer and nearer to the group.  Brophy once again sneaks away but sacrifices himself, bringing another death to the group.  Toliver and his men finally arrive at the rebel base camp, with Toliver combing the camp for Gabrielle.  After he finds her he returns to the others and hands each of them a set of explosives to be detonated by a timer.

Passage: Forced to give up his land and his only home, cantankerous Texas rancher Red Bovie isn't about to go quietly to the dismal trailer park that's all he can now afford, and instead goes off with his grandson Gally (son of his long-estranged son Jimmy) for a road trip to Old Mexico. They pick up two hitch-hikers who have stolen over $150,000 in drug money. But after Red drives off without them, unbeknownst to him the money remains in the car. They arrive in Mexico, still pursued by the drug dealers, who are pursued in turn by another hit-man looking to recover the stolen money. Red and Gally enjoy the town's attractions during the Mexican festival of the dead. As night falls, they visit a brothel where Red dances with the madame. They later meet a singer named Patty Wafers who is down on her luck. She is immediately attracted to Red's fearless and outrageous behavior. Meanwhile, the hit-man kills the American drug dealers and is now in pursuit of Red. Red discovers the money and desires to keep it so that he can have a better life than the one promised by the trailer park. Patty tries to help them return undetected across the border with the money, but the hit-man catches up with them and takes it. They pursue him, then they pursue another hit-man who has taken the money in turn. As Red and Patty's affection grows, Red begins to lose interest, but Gally, seeking his identity after the death of his father, takes up the pursuit in his place. They eventually overpower the second hit man and recover the money. Patty invites Red to live with her in her small town where she was born in northern Mexico. He accepts and is happy to go with her, knowing that with $150,000, they will live like royalty. As they part ways and Gally returns to the U.S., Red tells Gally that he has "found himself a grandson".

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.


Question:
Passage: In 1861 Saint-Saëns accepted his only post as a teacher, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse, Paris, which Louis Niedermeyer had established in 1853 to train first-rate organists and choirmasters for the churches of France. Niedermeyer himself was professor of piano; when he died in March 1861, Saint-Saëns was appointed to take charge of piano studies. He scandalised some of his more austere colleagues by introducing his students to contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. His best-known pupil, Gabriel Fauré, recalled in old age:
After allowing the lessons to run over, he would go to the piano and reveal to us those works of the masters from which the rigorous classical nature of our programme of study kept us at a distance and who, moreover, in those far-off years, were scarcely known. ... At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment ... the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I [have] had for him, throughout my life.
Saint-Saëns further enlivened the academic regime by writing, and composing incidental music for, a one-act farce performed by the students (including André Messager). He conceived his best-known piece, The Carnival of the Animals, with his students in mind, but did not finish composing it until 1886, more than twenty years after he left the Niedermeyer school.In 1864 Saint-Saëns caused some surprise by competing a second time for the Prix de Rome. Many in musical circles were puzzled by his decision to enter the competition again, now that he was establishing a reputation as a soloist and composer. He was once more unsuccessful. Berlioz, one of the judges, wrote:
We gave the Prix de Rome the other day to a young man who wasn't expecting to win it and who went almost mad with joy. We were all expecting the prize to go to Camille Saint-Saëns, who had the strange notion of competing. I confess I was sorry to vote against a man who is truly a great artist and one who is already well known, practically a celebrity. But the other man, who is still a student, has that inner fire, inspiration, he feels, he can do things that can't be learnt and the rest he'll learn more or less. So I voted for him, sighing at the thought of the unhappiness that this failure must cause Saint-Saëns. But, whatever else, one must be honest.

Passage: Ravel was not by inclination a teacher, but he gave lessons to a few young musicians he felt could benefit from them. Manuel Rosenthal was one, and records that Ravel was a very demanding teacher when he thought his pupil had talent. Like his own teacher, Fauré, he was concerned that his pupils should find their own individual voices and not be excessively influenced by established masters. He warned Rosenthal that it was impossible to learn from studying Debussy's music: "Only Debussy could have written it and made it sound like only Debussy can sound." When George Gershwin asked him for lessons in the 1920s, Ravel, after serious consideration, refused, on the grounds that they "would probably cause him to write bad Ravel and lose his great gift of melody and spontaneity". The best known composer who studied with Ravel was probably Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was his pupil for three months in 1907–08. Vaughan Williams recalled that Ravel helped him escape from "the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner ... Complexe mais pas compliqué was his motto."Vaughan Williams's recollections throw some light on Ravel's private life, about which the latter's reserved and secretive personality has led to much speculation. Vaughan Williams, Rosenthal and Marguerite Long have all recorded that Ravel frequented brothels. Long attributed this to his self-consciousness about his diminutive stature, and consequent lack of confidence with women. By other accounts, none of them first-hand, Ravel was in love with Misia Edwards, or wanted to marry the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. Rosenthal records and discounts contemporary speculation that Ravel, a lifelong bachelor, may have been homosexual. Such speculation recurred in a 2000 life of Ravel by Benjamin Ivry; subsequent studies have concluded that Ravel's sexuality and personal life remain a mystery.Ravel's first concert outside France was in 1909. As the guest of the Vaughan Williamses, he visited London, where he played for the Société des Concerts Français, gaining favourable reviews and enhancing his growing international reputation.

Passage: In 1848, at the age of thirteen, Saint-Saëns was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, France's foremost music academy. The director, Daniel Auber, had succeeded Luigi Cherubini in 1842, and brought a more relaxed regime than that of his martinet predecessor, though the curriculum remained conservative. Students, even outstanding pianists like Saint-Saëns, were encouraged to specialise in organ studies, because a career as a church organist was seen to offer more opportunities than that of a solo pianist. His organ professor was François Benoist, whom Saint-Saëns considered a mediocre organist but a first-rate teacher; his pupils included Adolphe Adam, César Franck, Charles Alkan, Louis Lefébure-Wély and Georges Bizet. In 1851 Saint-Saëns won the Conservatoire's top prize for organists, and in the same year he began formal composition studies. His professor was a protégé of Cherubini, Fromental Halévy, whose pupils included Charles Gounod and Bizet.Saint-Saëns's student compositions included a symphony in A major (1850) and a choral piece, Les Djinns (1850), after an eponymous poem by Victor Hugo. He competed for France's premier musical award, the Prix de Rome, in 1852 but was unsuccessful. Auber believed that the prize should have gone to Saint-Saëns, considering him to have more promise than the winner, Léonce Cohen, who made little mark during the rest of his career. In the same year Saint-Saëns had greater success in a competition organised by the Société Sainte-Cécile, Paris, with his Ode à Sainte-Cécile, for which the judges unanimously voted him the first prize. The first piece the composer acknowledged as a mature work and gave an opus number was Trois Morceaux for harmonium (1852).

Instruction: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.