Question:
Passage: In the US, "Diamonds" debuted at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 133,000 copies in its first week. In its fourth week, it climbed to number eight on the chart and became Rihanna's twenty-third top-ten single. For the week ending December 1, 2012, the song became Rihanna's twelfth number-one on the chart, which ended the nine-week reign of Maroon 5's "One More Night". With the feat, Rihanna tied Madonna and Supremes as the artists with the fifth-most number ones in the chart's history. Rihanna also passed Mariah Carey as the female artist to mark 12 number-one songs the fastest on the chart by achieving the feat in six years and seven months, which bested Carey's stretch of seven years, one month, and two weeks. "Diamonds" charted for a second consecutive week atop the Hot 100, while her album Unapologetic topped the Billboard 200. As a result, Rihanna became only the second artist of 2012 to top both the Billboard singles and albums charts simultaneously; the first to do so was English singer Adele.On the Radio Songs chart, "Diamonds" debuted at number 28. In its fourth week, it climbed to number ten, becoming Rihanna's 19th top ten, breaking a tie with Lil Wayne for the second-best sum in the list's 22-year history; only Mariah Carey (23) has more. For the issue dated December 15, the song topped the chart, becoming Rihanna's tenth number one and placing second for female artists with the most chart toppers, only behind Mariah Carey (11). On the Pop Songs chart, "Diamonds" debuted at number 29, extending Rihanna's lead as the artist with the most appearances on the chart. On October 11, 2012, Billboard unveiled new methodology for the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, newly factoring digital download sales and streaming data into the 50-position rankings, along with existing radio airplay data monitored by Nielsen BDS. Due to this, "Diamonds" saw a huge leap from number 66 to number one, marking Rihanna's second single as a lead artist to top the chart; it topped the chart for fourteen consecutive weeks. "Diamonds" topped the Dance Club Songs chart, becoming Rihanna's nineteenth number one, tying her with Janet Jackson for the second-most number ones in the chart's 36-year history. Only Madonna has more (43). "Diamonds" was certified sextuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In Canada, the song debuted at number nine on the Canadian Hot 100 for the issue dated October 13, 2012. The song peaked at number one on the issue dated November 24, 2012, becoming Rihanna's sixth single to reach number one on the chart. It remained atop of it for four consecutive weeks. It was certified platinum by Music Canada denoting sales of over 80,000 copies.

Passage: "Diamonds" is a song recorded by Barbadian singer Rihanna for her seventh studio album, Unapologetic (2012). It was written by Sia Furler together with its producers, Benny Blanco and StarGate. The song premiered on September 26, 2012, during the Elvis Duran and the Morning Show and was digitally released the following day as the lead single from Unapologetic. Def Jam Recordings serviced the single to contemporary hit radio in the United States on October 2. "Diamonds" is a mid-tempo pop, electronic and R&B ballad that features heavy synthesizers, orchestral sounds and electronic rhythms. The song's lyrics serve as a departure from the themes of unhealthy relationships that were on Rihanna's previous singles and contain a prominent concept of love.
"Diamonds" topped music charts in over twenty countries, including the United States, where it became Rihanna's twelfth number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 and tied her with Madonna and The Supremes for the fifth-most number one singles in the chart's history. "Diamonds" was certified quintuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and sold over 3.5 million digital copies in the country. By May 2013, it had sold over 7.5 million copies worldwide and became one of the best-selling singles of all-time.
The song's music video was shot by director Anthony Mandler, a frequent collaborator of Rihanna's, and depicts her in four environments that represent the elements of earth, air, water, and fire. The video received positive reviews and was praised for its imagery. Some critics believe that the heavily tattooed man intertwined with Rihanna's arm in the video resembles Chris Brown. The singer performed "Diamonds" on television shows such as Saturday Night Live and The X Factor and included it on the 777, Diamonds, Monster Tour and the Anti World Tour set lists. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) recognized it as one of the most performed songs of 2013 and 2014. The official remix of "Diamonds" featured rapper Kanye West and was released on November 16, 2012. The song has been covered by various recording artists, including Josef Salvat, who released his own cover of "Diamonds" as a single.

Passage: Rihanna first performed "Diamonds" on November 7, 2012, at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, where she wore black lingerie with black thigh high stockings and ankle boots; the show was aired by CBS on December 4. On November 10, Rihanna performed the song on Saturday Night Live. New York magazine's Joe Reid said that her performance was the highlight of the show's episode and favored the digitized background in particular, which he described as "overt weirdness" that was ultimately "pretty endearing". Tess Lynch of Grantland was impressed by Rihanna's "exceptional singing" and wrote that the background imagery was a "powerful" and "crazy spectacle that astonished viewers". Lynch agreed with episode host Anne Hathaway, who had said that Rihanna was "a goddess." "Diamonds" was included on the set list for Rihanna's 2012 promotional tour, the 777 Tour.On November 25, the singer performed the song on series 9 of The X Factor in the UK. The performance featured the singer dressed in a black gown on a square platform. As the chorus began, water effects poured down around her on the outside of the stage. By the final chorus, the water centered into the platform and wet the singer. Hayes of Irish Independent praised the performance and stated that it "put everything – and everybody – else to shame." On December 8, Rihanna performed the song on Wetten, dass..? ("Wanna bet that..?") in Germany. She also performed "Diamonds" on La Chanson de l'année ("The song of the Year") in France, on December 10, 2012, which was broadcast on December 29, 2012. The single was included as the closing song on the set list of Rihanna's fifth worldwide tour titled the Diamonds World Tour (2013).Rihanna performed "Diamonds" at the 2013 American Music Awards on November 24, 2013, during the acceptance of the Icon Award. The performance featured the singer wearing a long black dress plunged down to her navel and diamond adornments in her hair. She was joined by an orchestra that included a conductor which accompanied her as a rock band produced the beat. Kory Grow of Rolling Stone magazine labeled the performance as "stunning". Additionally, out of a total sixteen performances at the ceremony, he placed Rihanna's rendition of "Diamonds" at number one writing, "she gave a performance that showed she could live up to the honor". Los Angeles Times' Mikael Wood stated that during the performance Rihanna dominated the stage pointing that she looked like a young version of Grace Jones. The single was included on the set list of Rihanna's joint 2014 tour with rapper Eminem, The Monster Tour. Rihanna performed "Diamonds" on November 11, 2014 during the Concert for Valor held in Washington, D.C. Rihanna performed the single during her concerts part of the Anti World Tour in 2016.

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: Elements of Bush's lyrics employ historical or literary references, as embodied in her first single "Wuthering Heights", which is based on Emily Brontë's novel of the same name. She has described herself as a storyteller who embodies the character singing the song and has dismissed efforts by others to conceive of her work as autobiographical. Bush's lyrics have been known to touch on obscure or esoteric subject matter, and New Musical Express noted that Bush was not afraid to tackle sensitive and taboo subjects in her work. "The Kick Inside" is based on a traditional English folk song (The Ballad of Lucy Wan) about an incestuous pregnancy and a resulting suicide. "Kashka from Baghdad" is a song about a homosexual male couple; Out magazine listed two of her albums in their "Top 100 Greatest Gayest Albums" list. She has referenced G. I. Gurdjieff in the song "Them Heavy People", while "Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's autobiography, A Book of Dreams, about his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Reich. "Breathing" explores the results of nuclear fallout from the perspective of a fœtus.Other non-musical sources of inspiration for Bush include horror films, which have influenced the gothic nature of her songs, such as "Hounds of Love", which samples the 1957 horror movie Night of the Demon. "The Infant Kiss" is a song about a haunted, unstable woman's paedophilic infatuation with a young boy in her care (inspired by Jack Clayton's film The Innocents (1961), which had been based on Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw);. Her songs have occasionally combined comedy and horror to form dark humour, such as murder by poisoning in "Coffee Homeground", an alcoholic mother in "Ran Tan Waltz" and the upbeat "The Wedding List", a song inspired by François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black about the death of a groom and the bride's subsequent revenge against the killer. Bush has also cited comedy as a significant influence. She has cited Woody Allen, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and The Young Ones as particular favourites.

Passage: Love has been candid about her diverse musical influences, the earliest being Patti Smith, The Runaways, and The Pretenders, artists she discovered while in juvenile hall at age fifteen. As a child, her first exposure to music was records that her parents retrieved each month through Columbia Record Club. The first record Love owned was Leonard Cohen's Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), which she obtained from her mother: "He was so lyric-conscious and morbid, and I was a pretty morbid kid," she recalled. As a teenager, she named Flipper, Kate Bush, Soft Cell, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Lou Reed, and Dead Kennedys among her favorite artists. She has also spoken of her appreciation for new wave and post-punk bands she became acquainted with while living as a teenager in the United Kingdom, such as Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Television, Bauhaus, and Joy Division.While in Dublin at age fifteen, Love attended a Virgin Prunes concert, an event she credited as being a pivotal influence: "I had never seen so much sex, snarl, poetry, evil, restraint, grace, filth, raw power and the very essence of rock and roll," she recalled. "[I had seen] U2 [who] gave me lashes of love and inspiration, and a few nights later the Virgin Prunes fucked–me–up." Decades later, in 2009, Love introduced the band's frontman Gavin Friday at a Carnegie Hall event, and performed a song with him.Love's diverse genre interests were illustrated in a 1991 interview with Flipside, in which she stated: "There's a part of me that wants to have a grindcore band and another that wants to have a Raspberries-type pop band." Discussing the abrasive sound of Hole's debut album, she said she felt she had to "catch up with all my hip peers who'd gone all indie on me, and who made fun of me for liking R.E.M. and The Smiths." She has also embraced the influence of experimental artists and punk rock groups, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Big Black, Diamanda Galás, the Germs, and The Stooges. While writing Celebrity Skin, she drew influence from Neil Young and My Bloody Valentine. She has also cited her contemporary PJ Harvey as an influence, saying: "The one rock star that makes me know I'm shit is Polly Harvey. I'm nothing next to the purity that she experiences." In 2014, she named "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve as one of her favorite songs.Literature and poetry have often been a major influence on her songwriting; Love said she had "always wanted to be a poet, but there was no money in it." She has named the works of T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire as influential, and referenced works by Dante Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling, and Anne Sexton in her lyrics.

Passage: Two songs, "Kreuzberg" and "I Still Remember", explore sexuality and homosexuality; the former is an account of promiscuity in the Berlin area of the same name, while the latter details an unrequited crush of a boy for his schoolmate.The leading track, "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)", was inspired by Less Than Zero, a novel by Bret Easton Ellis which depicts excessive hedonism and its effects on individuals. The song title references the protagonist Clay and a billboard in the book which displays the phrase "Disappear Here", while the action is relocated to Les Trois Garçons restaurant in Shoreditch, East London. "Waiting for the 7.18" provides an escapist counterpoint by mentioning a trip to Brighton following disillusionment with working life in the capital. The fifth song on A Weekend in the City, "Uniform", references London again and criticises the youth subculture in the area. It is directly inspired by Douglas Rushkoff's Merchants of Cool documentary, which details the corporate exploitation of popular culture by advertisement companies.Okereke read Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, works which analyse how people experience leisure in modern societies, and was inspired to pen several songs which detail the drug and drink culture present in a metropolis. "The Prayer" is based on drug use during nights out in clubs, while "On" specifies the effects and after-effects of cocaine. Okereke tried to treat the tracks as explanations of people's actions, rather than moralising tales; he has stated, "In a time when so many people feel they can't communicate or feel hemmed in, I can see the appeal of cocaine." "Sunday" details the morning-after hangover following a drunken and promiscuous night out, while "SRXT" takes the form of a suicide note following the loneliness and despair of hedonism in the metropolis. The album closer is named after Seroxat, a trade name for the antidepressant paroxetine, and was crafted following the suicide attempts of two of Okereke's friends after they left university in 2005.

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: Although Chang'an was the capital of the earlier Han and Jin dynasties, after subsequent destruction in warfare, it was the Sui dynasty model that comprised the Tang era capital. The roughly square dimensions of the city had six miles (10 km) of outer walls running east to west, and more than five miles (8 km) of outer walls running north to south. The royal palace, the Taiji Palace, stood north of the city's central axis. From the large Mingde Gates located mid-center of the main southern wall, a wide city avenue stretched from there all the way north to the central administrative city, behind which was the Chentian Gate of the royal palace, or Imperial City. Intersecting this were fourteen main streets running east to west, while eleven main streets ran north to south. These main intersecting roads formed 108 rectangular wards with walls and four gates each, and each ward filled with multiple city blocks. The city was made famous for this checkerboard pattern of main roads with walled and gated districts, its layout even mentioned in one of Du Fu's poems. During the Heian period, the city of Heian kyō (present-day Kyoto) of Japan like many cities was arranged in the checkerboard street grid pattern of the Tang capital and in accordance with traditional geomancy following the model of Chang'an. Of these 108 wards in Chang'an, two of them (each the size of two regular city wards) were designated as government-supervised markets, and other space reserved for temples, gardens, ponds, etc. Throughout the entire city, there were 111 Buddhist monasteries, 41 Daoist abbeys, 38 family shrines, 2 official temples, 7 churches of foreign religions, 10 city wards with provincial transmission offices, 12 major inns, and 6 graveyards. Some city wards were literally filled with open public playing fields or the backyards of lavish mansions for playing horse polo and cuju football. In 662, Emperor Gaozong moved the imperial court to the Daming Palace, which became the political center of the empire and served as the royal residence of the Tang emperors for more than 220 years.

Passage: Although the Silk Road from China to Europe and the Western World was initially formulated during the reign of Emperor Wu (141–87 BC) during the Han, it was reopened by the Tang in 639 when Hou Junji (d. 643) conquered the West, and remained open for almost four decades. It was closed after the Tibetans captured it in 678, but in 699, during Empress Wu's period, the Silk Road reopened when the Tang reconquered the Four Garrisons of Anxi originally installed in 640, once again connecting China directly to the West for land-based trade. The Tang captured the vital route through the Gilgit Valley from Tibet in 722, lost it to the Tibetans in 737, and regained it under the command of the Goguryeo-Korean General Gao Xianzhi. When the An Lushan Rebellion ended in 763, the Tang Empire had once again lost control over its western lands, as the Tibetan Empire largely cut off China's direct access to the Silk Road. An internal rebellion in 848 ousted the Tibetan rulers, and Tang China regained its northwestern prefectures from Tibet in 851. These lands contained crucial grazing areas and pastures for raising horses that the Tang dynasty desperately needed.Despite the many expatriate European travelers coming into China to live and trade, many travelers, mainly religious monks and missionaries, recorded the strict border laws that the Chinese enforced. As the monk Xuanzang and many other monk travelers attested to, there were many Chinese government checkpoints along the Silk Road that examined travel permits into the Tang Empire. Furthermore, banditry was a problem along the checkpoints and oasis towns, as Xuanzang also recorded that his group of travelers were assaulted by bandits on multiple occasions.
The Silk Road also affected Tang dynasty art. Horses became a significant symbol of prosperity and power as well as an instrument of military and diplomatic policy. Horses were also revered as a relative of the dragon.

Passage: After usurping the throne of the Later Zhou dynasty, Emperor Taizu of Song (r. 960–976) spent sixteen years conquering the rest of China, reuniting much of the territory that had once belonged to the Han and Tang empires and ending the upheaval of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. In Kaifeng, he established a strong central government over the empire. The establishment of this capital marked the start of the Northern Song period. He ensured administrative stability by promoting the civil service examination system of drafting state bureaucrats by skill and merit (instead of aristocratic or military position) and promoted projects that ensured efficiency in communication throughout the empire. In one such project, cartographers created detailed maps of each province and city that were then collected in a large atlas. Emperor Taizu also promoted groundbreaking scientific and technological innovations by supporting such works as the astronomical clock tower designed and built by the engineer Zhang Sixun.The Song court maintained diplomatic relations with Chola India, the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, Srivijaya, the Kara-Khanid Khanate of Central Asia, the Goryeo kingdom in Korea, and other countries that were also trade partners with Japan. Chinese records even mention an embassy from the ruler of "Fu lin" (拂菻, i.e. the Byzantine Empire), Michael VII Doukas, and its arrival in 1081. However, China's closest neighbouring states had the greatest impact on its domestic and foreign policy. From its inception under Taizu, the Song dynasty alternated between warfare and diplomacy with the ethnic Khitans of the Liao dynasty in the northeast and with the Tanguts of the Western Xia in the northwest. The Song dynasty used military force in an attempt to quell the Liao dynasty and to recapture the Sixteen Prefectures, a territory under Khitan control since 938 that was traditionally considered to be part of China proper (Most parts of today's Beijing and Tianjin). Song forces were repulsed by the Liao forces, who engaged in aggressive yearly campaigns into Northern Song territory until 1005, when the signing of the Shanyuan Treaty ended these northern border clashes. The Song were forced to provide tribute to the Khitans, although this did little damage to the Song economy since the Khitans were economically dependent upon importing massive amounts of goods from the Song. More significantly, the Song state recognized the Liao state as its diplomatic equal. The Song created an extensive defensive forest along the Song-Liao border to thwart potential Khitan cavalry attacks.

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 story follows the insertion of British Commandos into Norway to rescue a Norwegian general from captivity and take him to the United Kingdom to lead the Free Norwegian Forces.
The film opens with the execution of a British spy who was sent to support partisan activities. A small team is assembled which consists of Capt. Robert Owen, a Canadian, Sgt. Harry Hall, a Briton and a Norwegian called Lt. Erik Falken. The team parachutes in and soon after arriving Falken is recognised by a local woman who reports them to her German lover and Dalberg, a Quisling. A team is sent to capture them but after they overpower their captors and free the general from the prison camp they are soon being pursued by the German authorities.
Once on the road in a captured German car they are attacked and forced to take shelter after Heden is hurt. They send Falken to get assistance from a doctor but he is betrayed once again by the same woman whom he had known when growing up in his hometown. The Germans take Falken alive and, pretending to be the doctor they requested, capture Owen near the house they are hiding in. Hall manages to keep Heden in safety in the house.
Owen misleads the Germans about their escape plans and after the Germans have realised their mistake they are surprised to find that the two prisoners have been freed by Dalberg. Owen and Falken manages to return to Hall and Heden and the party moves off to rendezvous with the incoming commandos and Royal Navy boats.
The film includes real footage from British Commando raids on German occupying forces in Norway in March and December of 1941.

Passage: The film is set in an alternative-history version of nineteenth century England where packs of wolves roam the countryside.
Bonnie Green is the spoiled daughter of Lord and Lady Willoughby, who live at the country estate of Willoughby Chase. Lady WIlloughby is ill, and her father plans to take a convalescence to the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, in London, Bonnie's cousin, Sylvia, is leaving her Aunt Jane to keep Bonnie company while her parents are away. While travelling on a train, she meets a mysterious man named Grimshaw. At Willoughby Chase, a beautiful middle-aged woman arrives revealing herself to be Bonnie and Sylvia's fourth cousin and their new governess, Letitia Slighcarp.  The following morning, Bonnie sneaks into the carriage meant to pick up Sylvia, taking with her a rifle. When the train arrives at the station, Mr. Grimshaw is knocked unconscious after wolves attempt to attack the train. Bonnie and Sylvia take Mr. Grimshaw with them back to Willoughby Chase. Not soon after, Bonnie's parents leave for their convalescence aboard the Thessaly. The next day, Bonnie and Sylvia go out on a sleigh and almost are attacked by wolves until a boy named Simon, who lives in a cave and raises geese, rescues them. They return in the night to discover that Miss Slighcarp has dismissed all the servants except for James and Pattern.  During dinner, Miss Slighcarp refuses to give an explanation to the servants' dismissal, gives the girls oatmeal instead of the usual feast and she harshly reprimands Bonnie after she accidentally spills cream on her father's farewell letter, thus Bonnie begins to suspect her governess's true cold and evil nature.

Passage: American NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 is hijacked from orbit by an unidentified spaceship. The United States suspects it to be the work of the Soviets, but the British suspect Japanese involvement since the spacecraft, after having "swallowed" Jupiter 16, landed in the Sea of Japan. To investigate, MI6 operative James Bond is sent to Tokyo, after faking his own death in Hong Kong and being buried at sea from HMS Tenby.
Upon his arrival, Bond meets a mysterious Japanese woman while watching a sumo match. She introduces Bond to local MI6 operative Dikko Henderson, who claims to have critical evidence about the rogue craft, but is killed before he can elaborate. Bond chases and kills the assailant, taking the assailant's clothing as a disguise, and is driven in the getaway car to Osato Chemicals. Once there, Bond subdues the driver and breaks into the office safe of president Mr. Osato. After obtaining certain documents, Bond is pursued by armed security, but is rescued by the woman he had met earlier, who flees to a secluded subway station. Bond chases her, but falls down a trap door leading to the office of the head of the Japanese secret service, Tiger Tanaka, who reveals that the woman is his assistant Aki. The stolen documents are examined, and found to include a photograph of the cargo ship Ning-Po, with a microdot message saying the tourist who took the photo was killed as a security precaution. While at Tanaka's spa, Bond meets with Aki again and they spend the night together.

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: Halsy Knox, a professional motorcycle racer, runs into Little Fauss, an amateur racer, after a race held near Phoenix, Arizona. They strike up a friendship as Fauss is attracted to Halsy's carefree lifestyle. Fauss's father, however, regards Halsy as a bad influence on his son and refuses to help Halsy when his truck breaks down. When Halsy arrives later at the motorcycle repair shop where Fauss is employed he tricks the admiring Fauss into repairing his motorcycle for free. Halsy, who has been barred from racing for drinking on the track, When Fauss breaks his leg, Halsey proposes that they form a partnership in which Halsy would race under Fauss's name with Fauss serving as the mechanic. Fauss joins Halsy on the motorcycle racing circuit despite his parent's disapproval. Fauss is constantly confronted with his inferiority to Halsy, both on and off the racetrack. Their partnership is finally broken when Rita Nebraska, a drop-out from a wealthy background, arrives at the racetrack and immediately attaches herself to Halsy, despite the attention Fauss pays her. Fauss returns home to his parents to find his father has died. Several months later, Halsy visits him and attempts to ditch Rita, who is now pregnant. Fauss, however, refuses to take her. He informs Halsy that he plans to reenter the racing circuit. The two men race against each other a short time later at the Sears Point International Raceway. Halsy's motorcycle breaks down. As he leaves the track, he hears the announcement that Fauss has taken the lead.
In addition to the above Plot summary, at the Sears Point meeting Fauss tells Halsy that he has been drafted. The difference between these two characters is further defined.

Passage: 1953: Through the course of a Colorado autumn and winter, Mary Spencer and Fred Wilson lead an idyllic existence. Mary drops out of college (with 6 months to go) to marry Fred. Their perfect wedding mirrors the happy endings of the films Mary loves.
1969: It is the Wilsons' 16th wedding anniversary. On his way to work, Fred, a successful tax consultant, tells their maid Agnes that he has found vodka hidden in Mary's wardrobe and asks Agnes to keep an eye on his wife. Mary sets out for the beauty parlour. At an airline office, however, Mary buys a one-way ticket to Nassau, Bahamas looking for an escape from her dull and unhappy suburban life.
On the flight she recalls the horrors of last year's anniversary party, when Fred had drunkenly flirted with a blond divorcee, and she had taken refuge in the bottle and a rerun of Casablanca. At a stop-over, she calls home and learns this year's anniversary party has been a different sort of disaster. Her teenage daughter Marge is scared by Mary's call, as it reminds her of the time she had found her mother unconscious after an overdose.
En route to Nassau, Mary meets Flo, an old college friend she has not seen since 1953. While Mary settled down to married life, Flo has been the mistress of a series of married men and lives a rather carefree and hedonistic lifestyle and has fully embraced the sexual revolution. She is on her way to Nassau to meet her latest beau, Sam. Mary tells her she has had to get away from Fred, so Flo promises to look after her.

Passage: In 1997, Luke Glanton is a motorcycle stuntman. In Schenectady, New York, Luke reunites with his ex-lover Romina Gutierrez, who is dating another man named Kofi Kancam. Luke discovers that Romina has a baby son named Jason that he fathered which she never revealed to him, so Luke quits his job to stay with Romina and their son.
Luke begins working part-time for auto mechanic Robin Van Der Hook. Luke asks Robin for more work and Robin who can't offer it legitimately, reveals his past as a successful bank robber and offers to partner up for a few robberies. Skeptical at first, Luke decides to take Robin up on his offer after planning and setting up their first job. They successfully pull off a few heists by having Luke rob the bank at gun point, use his bike as a getaway vehicle and ride it into a box truck driven by Robin.
Luke uses his share of the money to get closer to Romina, and visits her and his son more often. Luke takes Romina and Jason out for ice cream, and the three ask a passerby to take a photo to capture the moment.
Luke and Kofi, who objects to Luke's presence, get into a fight, and Luke is arrested after hitting Kofi in the head with a wrench. After Robin bails him out of jail, Luke insists on giving his robbery money to Romina to give to Jason when he's older. Luke insists on resuming their bank robberies, but Robin objects, and the two have a falling-out that results in Robin dismantling Luke's motorcycle. Luke robs Robin at gunpoint, and uses the money to buy a new bike.
Luke attempts to rob a bank alone but fails to properly plan for the job and is pursued by police. Luke is cornered in the top floor of a house by rookie police officer Avery Cross and calls Romina, asking her not to tell Jason who he was. Avery enters the room and shoots Luke in the stomach. Luke fires back, hitting Avery in the leg, but falls three stories out of the window to his death.

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 Billings, Montana, a police officer arrives and discovers Woody Grant walking on the shoulder of the roadway. Woody is picked up by his son David, who learns that Woody wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect a million dollar sweepstakes prize he believes he has won. When David sees the sweepstakes letter, he knows immediately that it is a mail scam designed to get gullible people to purchase magazine subscriptions. David brings his father home, where his mother Kate becomes increasingly annoyed by Woody's insistence on collecting the money.
After Woody is picked up again trying to get to Nebraska, David and his brother Ross discuss putting Woody in a retirement home. David pays a visit with his ex-girlfriend, Noel, who returns his belongings and refuses to move back in with him. Their conversation is cut short by a call from Kate reporting that Woody has taken off once again. David retrieves Woody and decides to drive him all the way to Lincoln, much to Kate's dismay.
While in Rapid City, South Dakota, Woody goes on a bender and hits his head while stumbling back to their motel room. David takes him to the hospital to get his head stitched up. David learns that they will be passing through Woody's hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska, and suggests they spend the night with Woody's family. Woody is against the idea, but they end up going anyway.
They stay with Woody's brother Ray, his wife, and their two sons, Cole and Bart. Woody and David visit a mechanic shop Woody once co-owned, followed by some beers at a bar. When David brings up Woody's alcoholism and problems within the family—with Woody implying that he did not love Kate nor really want children—they get into an argument. At another bar, they meet Ed Pegram, whom the family blames for stealing Woody's air compressor decades ago. Over David's objections, Woody mentions winning the money and the barflies toast his good fortune. The next day, they learn that the news has spread through the town like wildfire.

Passage: Michael Woods is a lazy, preppy 20-year-old living off his parents' wealth in Los Angeles, while struggling through college classes and dating a spoiled heiress named Gina, whom his family dislikes. Michael learns that his 11-year-old cousin Tommy Biggs, whom he has not seen since a family reunion several years earlier, will soon be arriving from Montana to visit. Michael casts Tommy aside during his visit, prioritizing his social life and the demands of his girlfriend over his guest.
On Tommy's last day in California, the family housekeeper Arlene makes Michael aware of his mistreatment toward Tommy. Michael decides to take Tommy to Disneyland to make up for it. However, en route to the theme park, Michael receives a phone call from Gina pleading for him to meet her at a racetrack so she can introduce him to her father. Michael capitulates and leaves Tommy at an indoor kiddie park, then drives to the track for a brief visit. At the race track, Michael charms Gina's father over the course of a couple hours. When Michael realizes how late it is, he hurries back to pick up Tommy, and accidentally collides his Porsche Boxster with another vehicle. Afterwards upon arriving at the kiddie park, Michael learns Arlene had picked up Tommy several hours earlier. When he comes home, Tommy angrily confronts him about this. They don't tell his parents about it and Michael lies that he got the dent in his car from a hit-and-run.

Passage: NYPD officer Charlie Lang is a kind and generous man who loves his job in Queens, New York, where he lives. His wife, Muriel, works at a hair salon and, unlike him, is greedy, materialistic, and selfish, constantly complaining about their situation in life. Waitress Yvonne Biasi is bankrupt because her husband, Eddie, whom she could not yet afford to divorce, emptied their joint checking account without her permission, while also leaving her with over $12,000 in credit card debt. Charlie meets her when she waits on him at the diner where she works. Since he doesn't have enough money to pay the tip, he promises to give her either double the tip or half of his prospective lottery winnings the next day using a ticket which has numbers he regularly plays. He wins $4 million ($6.8 million today) in the lottery the next day and keeps his promise, despite Muriel's protests.
He and Yvonne become stars almost immediately. She buys the diner and sets up a table with his name at which people who can't afford a meal can eat for free. In another development, he becomes a hero for foiling an attempted robbery at a grocery store but gets wounded in the process, forcing him to take a leave of absence from the police force. Meanwhile, Muriel goes on a shopping spree, and also contracts for disruptive renovations to their apartment without consulting him.

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 1917, Stan and Ollie are drafted into the American Expeditionary Force to fight in World War I. Their ineptitude during basic training antagonizes the drill sergeant and they are assigned to kitchen duties. They misunderstand the cook's instructions and empty the garbage cans into the general's private dining room. The cook, who is thrown in the stockade with them, curses their "snitching" and threatens them with violence after they are released. They escape his wrath when they are shipped to the trenches in France.
Serving close to the front line, they befriend soldier Eddie Smith, who receives a Dear John letter from his wife. When Eddie is killed in action, the boys determine to rescue Eddie's daughter from her brutal foster father and deliver her to Eddie's parents. They distinguish themselves in combat by losing control of a tank and accidentally forcing a German platoon into the open.
After the Armistice, Stan and Ollie venture to New York City to retrieve the girl and look for Eddie's parents. Using the city telephone directory, the task proves both monumental and problematic as the boys blindly attempt to visit each Smith until they find the grandparents. After taking punches from an annoyed prizefighter and disrupting a society wedding, they resort to telephoning first.
While operating their lunch wagon, the boys are approached by an unpleasant civil servant who demands Eddie's child so that she can be placed in an orphanage. The boys refuse, and the man says he will return with the police to have the boys arrested.
They try to secure a loan with their lunch wagon to finance their escape to another city, but the banker smirks that he'd have to be unconscious to make such a deal. While laughing, he topples a bust onto his own head and knocks himself out. Taking this as approval, the boys take what they need from the bank vault.

Passage: The Stooges are artists (Moe is a sculptor, Larry is a music composer, and Curly is a painter) living in Paris. When the landlord comes after the overdue rent, the boys skip out and wind up accidentally joining the French Foreign Legion that they confuse with the American Legion. Posted to the desert, their assignment is to guard Captain Gorgonzola from the natives. When the captain is kidnapped, the boys are given a chance to bring him back alive.
The Stooges make their way to the town where the captain was taken, all disguised as Santa Claus (complete with a sleigh and a reindeer). Despite the disguise not working, they are able to quickly knock out a guard who confronted them and make their way further into town. Ultimately, they find their captain held by a sheik trying to offer him expensive jewelry and a harem of beautiful women in exchange for the Legion's ammunition. The trio are forced to disguise themselves again as part of the harem and use an opportunity during a dance to render the sheik and his head bodyguard unconscious. The four then escape, but end up coming across a lion's den. Before the lion could eat them, Curly is able to placate it into drawing them on a wagon back to their camp.

Passage: In the heyday of vaudeville, on the verge of America's entrance into World War I, two talented performers, Jo Hayden and Harry Palmer, set their sights on playing the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the epitome of vaudeville success, and marrying immediately after.
Just weeks before their plans are to be realized Harry gets a draft notice. Intending to obtain a short delay before reporting for duty, he intentionally smashes his hand in a trunk.  That same day Jo is notified that her brother, who had been studying to be a doctor, has died in the war.
When she realizes what Harry has done, she rejects him and leaves the act. Harry then tries to undo his rash act and enlist, but none of the armed services will take him as his hand has been permanently crippled. Eventually he resigns himself to participating in the war effort the only way left open to him, entertaining front line troops for the YMCA.
When he and his partner find themselves dangerously close to the front, Harry heroically sets out to warn off an ambulance convoy heading into an artillery bombardment. He is wounded while destroying an enemy machine gun emplacement ambushing the convoy and is apparently commended for his bravery.
After the war, during a victory performance at the Palace Theatre, Jo sees Harry in the audience and runs to him. The two reunite on stage to sing "For Me and My Gal", the first song they ever performed together.

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: While on a holiday in Mallorca, Lisa, Kim, and Tammi meet four young men, Bluey, Josh, Sean, and Marcus. After spending the day at the resort together, the girls are invited to the men's yacht, where they plan to party out at sea. While aboard the boat, they take drugs and the conversation turns to sex, and in particular, types of sexual acts. Bluey describes a sex act called a "donkey punch" which involves punching the female in the back of the head while having doggy style sex in order to increase the sexual pleasure for the man.
Marcus, Bluey, Kim, and Lisa go to the master bedrooms, where they begin having drug-fuelled sex. They are watched by Josh who, in the knowledge of all involved, lingers furtively in the darkness, recording the action with a camera. Bluey, who is copulating with Lisa, asks Josh to film the action and then decides to let Josh take a turn. Josh and Lisa then have anal sex. Immediately prior to ejaculation and with Bluey's encouragement, Josh donkey punches Lisa but uses excessive force, breaking her neck and killing her instantly. To cover up the incident, the men decide to throw the body overboard while the women want to report it to the authorities, and argument ensues about what to do with the tape. Bluey continually insults Tammi and in a fit of rage, she stabs him in the chest with a knife, and the women escape in the yacht's tender. However, the girls soon realise that the tender's outboard motor is missing (a cut scene shows it still attached to the yacht). In a fit of despair, Tammi fires a flare, attracting the attention of the men. They quickly locate and pick up the women.

Passage: Tara is a wife to Mark and a stay-at-home mother to two children, Teddy and Florrie. Tara goes to a nearby park and seems upset. There is a passage of time.
Tara and Mark are asleep in bed, when they are woken by a phone call. Tara resignedly has sex with Mark, during which she is in tears, unknowingly to Mark. She helps Mark get ready for work, and takes the children to school. When she leaves the school she stops and stands outside, in distress. The following Saturday morning Tara wakes up early, trying not to wake up Mark. He does wake up and she reluctantly engages in sex with him, again in distress unnoticed by Mark. Following a visit to the park, Mark tries to have sex with her in one of the children's rooms, which she refuses. Mark questions whether she's having an affair which she denies and they argue. Later they're having a BBQ with friends and Mark berates her for not providing drinks for the guests. That evening they are having sex again, and Tara again is crying and in distress. Afterwards she repeatedly whispers that she is not happy, and after some brief discussion with Mark she says she's going to sleep. There is a passage of time.

Passage: The legendary American movie star and sex symbol Marlo Manners is in London, England, where she has just married for the sixth time. She and her new husband, Sir Michael Barrington, then depart for a honeymoon suite at a posh and exclusive hotel that has been reserved for them by her manager, Dan Turner.
The hotel is also the location of an international conference, where leaders have come together to resolve tensions and problems that threaten the survival of the world. As the chairman, Mr. Chambers is trying to call the meeting to order, the delegates are crowding to the windows in an effort to catch a glimpse of Marlo when she arrives.
As they enter the lobby, Marlo, now Lady Barrington, and her husband, a knight, are swarmed by admirers and reporters. When asked, "Do you get a lot of proposals from your male fans?" she quips, "Yeah, and what they propose is nobody's business."
Once inside their suite, the couple are unable to go to bed and have sex because of constant interruptions due to the demands of her career, such as interviews, dress fittings and photo sessions, as well as the various men, including some former husbands, diplomat Alexei Andreyev Karansky, director Laslo Karolny, gangster Vance Norton, and an entire athletic team from the U.S., all of whom want to have sex with her.
Meanwhile, Turner desperately searches for an audiotape containing his client's memoirs, in order to destroy it. Marlo has recorded extensive details about her affairs and scandals, with a lot of dirt about her husbands and lovers. Ex-husband Alexei, who is the Russian delegate at the conference, threatens to derail the intense negotiations unless he can have another sexual encounter with her. Marlo is expected to work "undercover" to ensure world peace.

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 1897 Ravel was readmitted to the Conservatoire, studying composition with Fauré, and taking private lessons in counterpoint with André Gedalge. Both these teachers, particularly Fauré, regarded him highly and were key influences on his development as a composer. As Ravel's course progressed, Fauré reported "a distinct gain in maturity ... engaging wealth of imagination". Ravel's standing at the Conservatoire was nevertheless undermined by the hostility of the Director, Théodore Dubois, who deplored the young man's musically and politically progressive outlook. Consequently, according to a fellow-student, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, he was "a marked man, against whom all weapons were good". He wrote some substantial works while studying with Fauré, including the overture Shéhérazade and a violin sonata, but he won no prizes, and therefore was expelled again in 1900. As a former student he was allowed to attend Fauré's classes as a non-participating "auditeur" until finally abandoning the Conservatoire in 1903.In 1899 Ravel composed his first piece to become widely known, though it made little impact initially: Pavane pour une infante défunte ("Pavane for a dead princess"). It was originally a solo piano work, commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac. In 1897 he conducted the first performance of the Shéhérazade overture, which had a mixed reception, with boos mingling with applause from the audience, and unflattering reviews from the critics. One described the piece as "a jolting debut: a clumsy plagiarism of the Russian School" and called Ravel a "mediocrely gifted debutant ... who will perhaps become something if not someone in about ten years, if he works hard." Another critic, Pierre Lalo, thought that Ravel showed talent, but was too indebted to Debussy and should instead emulate Beethoven. Over the succeeding decades Lalo became Ravel's most implacable critic.From the start of his career, Ravel appeared calmly indifferent to blame or praise. Those who knew him well believed that this was no pose but wholly genuine. The only opinion of his music that he truly valued was his own, perfectionist and severely self-critical. At twenty years of age he was, in the words of the biographer Burnett James, "self-possessed, a little aloof, intellectually biased, given to mild banter." He dressed like a dandy and was meticulous about his appearance and demeanour. Orenstein comments that, short in stature, light in frame, and bony in features, Ravel had the "appearance of a well-dressed jockey", whose large head seemed suitably matched to his formidable intellect. During the late 1890s and into the early years of the next century, Ravel was bearded in the fashion of the day; from his mid-thirties he was clean-shaven.

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: With the encouragement of his parents, Ravel applied for entry to France's most important musical college, the Conservatoire de Paris. In November 1889, playing music by Chopin, he passed the examination for admission to the preparatory piano class run by Eugène Anthiome. Ravel won the first prize in the Conservatoire's piano competition in 1891, but otherwise he did not stand out as a student.   Nevertheless, these years were a time of considerable advance in his development as a composer. The musicologist Arbie Orenstein writes that for Ravel the 1890s were a period "of immense growth ... from adolescence to maturity."
In 1891 Ravel progressed to the classes of Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot, for piano, and Émile Pessard, for harmony. He made solid, unspectacular progress, with particular encouragement from Bériot but, in the words of the musical scholar Barbara L. Kelly, he "was only teachable on his own terms". His later teacher Gabriel Fauré understood this, but it was not generally acceptable to the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire of the 1890s. Ravel was expelled in 1895, having won no more prizes. His earliest works to survive in full are from these student days: Sérénade grotesque, for piano, and "Ballade de la Reine morte d'aimer", a mélodie setting a poem by Roland de Marès (both 1893).Ravel was never so assiduous a student of the piano as his colleagues such as Viñes and Cortot were. It was plain that as a pianist he would never match them, and his overriding ambition was to be a composer. From this point he concentrated on composition. His works from the period include the songs "Un grand sommeil noir" and "D'Anne jouant de l'espinette" to words by Paul Verlaine and Clément Marot, and the piano pieces Menuet antique and Habanera (for four-hands), the latter eventually incorporated into the Rapsodie espagnole. At around this time, Joseph Ravel introduced his son to Erik Satie, who was earning a living as a café pianist. Ravel was one of the first musicians – Debussy was another – who recognised Satie's originality and talent. Satie's constant experiments in musical form were an inspiration to Ravel, who counted them "of inestimable value".

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: North Sister, also known as "Faith", is the oldest and most highly eroded of the three, with zigzagging rock pinnacles between glaciers. It is a shield volcano that overlays a more ancient shield volcano named Little Brother. North Sister is 5 miles (8 km) wide, and its summit elevation is 10,090 feet (3,075 m). Consisting primarily of basaltic andesite, it has a more mafic composition than the other two volcanoes. Its deposits are rich in palagonite and red and black cinders, and they are progressively more iron-rich the younger they are. North Sister's lava flows demonstrate similar compositions throughout the mountain's long eruptive history. The oldest lava flows on North Sister have been dated to roughly 311,000 years ago, though the oldest reliably dated deposits are approximately 119,000 years old. Estimates place the volcano's last eruption at 46,000 years ago, in the Late Pleistocene.North Sister possesses more dikes than any similar Cascade peak, caused by lava intruding into pre-existing rocks. Many of these dikes were pushed aside by the intrusion of a 980-foot (300 m)-wide volcanic plug. The dikes and plug were exposed by centuries of erosion.   At one point, the volcano stood more than 11,000 feet (3,400 m) high, but erosion reduced this volume by a quarter to a third. The plug is now exposed and forms North Sister's summits at Prouty Peak and the South Horn.

Passage: To have reached its enormous size within its relatively short (geologically speaking) 600,000 to 1,000,000 years of life, Mauna Loa would logically have had to have grown extremely rapidly through its developmental history, and extensive charcoal-based radiocarbon dating (perhaps the most extensive such prehistorical eruptive dating on Earth) has amassed a record of almost two hundred reliably dated extant flows confirming this hypothesis.The oldest exposed flows on Mauna Loa are thought to be the Ninole Hills on its southern flank, subaerial basalt rock dating back approximately 100 to 200 thousand years. They form a terrace against which younger flows have since banked, heavily eroded and incised against its slope in terms of direction; this is believed to be the result of a period of erosion because of a change in the direction of lava flow caused by the volcano's prehistoric slump. These are followed by two units of lava flows separated by an intervening ash layer known as the Pāhala ash layer: the older Kahuka basalt, sparsely exposed on the lower southwest rift, and the younger and far more widespread Kaʻu basalt, which appear more widely on the volcano. The Pāhala ashes themselves were produced over a long period of time circa 13 to 30 thousand years ago, although heavy vitrification and interactions with post and pre- creation flows has hindered exact dating. Their age roughly corresponding with the glaciation of Mauna Loa during the last ice age, raising the distinct possibility that it is the product of phreatomagmatic interaction between the long-gone glaciers and Mauna Loa's eruptive activities.Studies have shown that a cycle occurs in which volcanic activity at the summit is dominant for several hundred years, after which activity shifts to the rift zones for several more centuries, and then back to the summit again. Two cycles have been clearly identified, each lasting 1,500–2,000 years. This cyclical behavior is unique to Mauna Loa among the Hawaiian volcanoes. Between about 7,000 and 6,000 years ago Mauna Loa was largely inactive. The cause of this cessation in activity is not known, and no known similar hiatus has been found at other Hawaiian volcanoes except for those currently in the post-shield stage. Between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago, activity was more intense than it is today. However, Mauna Loa's overall rate of growth has probably begun to slow over the last 100,000 years, and the volcano may in fact be nearing the end of its tholeiitic basalt shield-building phase.

Passage: At 3:06 pm, on November 13, 1985, Nevado del Ruiz began to erupt, ejecting dacitic tephra more than 30 kilometres (19 mi) into the atmosphere. The total mass of the erupted material (including magma) was 35 million tonnes—only 3% of the amount that erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980.  The eruption reached a value of 3 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The mass of the ejected sulfur dioxide was about 700,000 tonnes, or about 2% of the mass of the erupted solid material, making the eruption atypically sulfur-rich.The eruption produced pyroclastic flows that melted summit glaciers and snow, generating four thick lahars that raced down river valleys on the volcano's flanks. It also destroyed a small lake that was observed in Arenas crater several months before the eruption. Water in such volcanic lakes tends to be extremely salty and contain dissolved volcanic gases. The lake's hot, acidic water significantly accelerated the melting of the ice; this effect was confirmed by the large amounts of sulfates and chlorides found in the lahar flow.
The lahars, formed of water, ice, pumice, and other rocks, mixed with clay as they travelled down the volcano's flanks. They ran down the volcano's sides at an average speed of 60 km per hour, eroding soil, dislodging rock, and destroying vegetation. After descending thousands of meters down the side of the volcano, the lahars were directed into all of the six river valleys leading from the volcano. While in the river valleys, the lahars grew to almost 4 times their original volume. In the Gualí River, a lahar reached a maximum width of 50 meters (200 ft).One of the lahars virtually erased the town of Armero in Tolima, which lay in the Lagunilla River valley. Only one quarter of its 28,700 inhabitants survived. The second lahar, which descended through the valley of Chinchiná River, killed about 1,800 people and destroyed about 400 homes in the town of Chinchiná, in the department of Caldas. In total, over 23,000 people were killed and approximately 5,000 were injured. More than 5,000 homes were destroyed. The Armero tragedy, as the event came to be known, was the second-deadliest volcanic disaster in the 20th century, being surpassed only by the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée, and is the fourth-deadliest volcanic eruption in recorded history. It is also the deadliest known lahar, and Colombia's worst natural disaster. A young girl named Omayra Sánchez became a worldwide symbol of the disaster after images of her trapped under the debris of her former home, after the eruption made the news worldwide.

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: Michael Williams is a drifter living out of his car after being discharged from the Marine Corps. A job on an oilfield falls through due to his unwillingness to conceal a war injury on his job application, so Michael wanders into rural Red Rock, Wyoming, looking for other work. A local bar owner named Wayne mistakes him for a hit man, "Lyle from Dallas", whom Wayne has hired to kill his wife. Wayne offers him a stack of cash—"half now, half later"—and Michael plays along by taking the money.
Michael visits Wayne's wife, Suzanne and attempts to warn her that her life is in danger instead of killing her. She offers him more money to kill Wayne. Michael tries to leave town but a car accident leads him to encounter the local sheriff, who turns out to be Wayne. Michael manages to escape from Wayne but runs into the real Lyle from Dallas. Lyle and Wayne quickly figure out what has transpired, while Michael desperately tries to warn Suzanne before Lyle finds her.
The next morning, when Lyle comes to get money from Wayne, he kidnaps both Suzanne and Michael, who are trying to retrieve hidden cash from Wayne's office. Wayne and Suzanne are revealed to be wanted for embezzlement and Wayne is arrested by his own deputies. Lyle returns with Michael and Suzanne hostage and gets Wayne out of jail to retrieve their stash of money. At a remote graveyard, Wayne pulls a gun from the case of money and holds Lyle at gunpoint before Lyle throws a knife into Wayne's neck. Michael and Lyle fight, with Lyle ending up being impaled on a grave marker. When Lyle rises to attack Michael, Suzanne shoots him dead.
Michael and Suzanne escape onto a nearby train, but when Suzanne tries to betray Michael, he throws the money out of the speeding train and then throws Suzanne off to be arrested by the police accompanied by a wounded Wayne. Michael's train continues its journey into a new town.

Passage: Joshua and his boss, Vincent, are driving to a hospital. Both have been shot and are in pain. Joshua thinks back to his childhood, when his father was shot in front of his eyes.
In a flashback, Joshua and his partner, Mickey, visit people that owe money to Vincent.  They encounter a crazy druggie who tells them that a small-time drug dealer named Frankie Tahoe wants to kill Vincent. Joshua and Mickey inform Vincent, and the trio intimidate a guy who works for Tahoe into telling them where he can be found.  They find Tahoe at a nightclub. During a talk, Tahoe insults the religion of Joshua and Vincent, which they hold dear, and Vincent beats Tahoe to death with a baseball bat. The trio dump the body in a landfill. While doing this, Vincent reveals that Mickey and Vincent's wife have been having an affair. Vincent then kills Mickey.
While Joshua and Vincent are having breakfast, Joshua tells his boss that he has become weary of the violence and wants to retire. Vincent admits that he has violent outbursts but insists that Joshua owes him his life. Angered, Vincent says that Joshua cannot retire.  He leaves to go home, where he discovers two men watching his house. While confronting them, Joshua appears. The men tell Vincent that they have been ordered to deliver him to Nino, a powerful crime boss. When Nino calls his men, Vincent answers the cellphone. Vincent and Joshua get in the car and are driven to Nino's house.

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: Alexander perhaps undercut his own rule by demonstrating signs of megalomania. While utilizing effective propaganda such as the cutting of the Gordian Knot, he also attempted to portray himself as a living god and son of Zeus following his visit to the oracle at Siwah in the Libyan Desert (in modern-day Egypt) in 331 BC. His attempt in 327 BC to have his men prostrate before him in Bactra in an act of proskynesis borrowed from the Persian kings was rejected as religious blasphemy by his Macedonian and Greek subjects after his court historian Callisthenes refused to perform this ritual. When Alexander had Parmenion murdered at Ecbatana (near modern Hamadan, Iran) in 330 BC, this was "symptomatic of the growing gulf between the king's interests and those of his country and people", according to Errington. His murder of Cleitus the Black in 328 BC is described as "vengeful and reckless" by Dawn L. Gilley and Ian Worthington. Continuing the polygamous habits of his father, Alexander encouraged his men to marry native women in Asia, leading by example when he wed Roxana, a Sogdian princess of Bactria. He then married Stateira II, eldest daughter of Darius III, and Parysatis II, youngest daughter of Artaxerxes III, at the Susa weddings in 324 BC.Meanwhile, in Greece, the Spartan king Agis III attempted to lead a rebellion of the Greeks against Macedonia. He was defeated in 331 BC at the Battle of Megalopolis by Antipater, who was serving as regent of Macedonia and deputy hegemon of the League of Corinth in Alexander's stead. Before Antipater embarked on his campaign in the Peloponnese, Memnon, the governor of Thrace, was dissuaded from rebellion by use of diplomacy. Antipater deferred the punishment of Sparta to the League of Corinth headed by Alexander, who ultimately pardoned the Spartans on the condition that they submit fifty nobles as hostages. Antipater's hegemony was somewhat unpopular in Greece due to his practice (perhaps by order of Alexander) of exiling malcontents and garrisoning cities with Macedonian troops, yet in 330 BC, Alexander declared that the tyrannies installed in Greece were to be abolished and Greek freedom was to be restored.

Passage: When Alexander the Great died at Babylon in 323 BC, his mother Olympias immediately accused Antipater and his faction of poisoning him, although there is no evidence to confirm this. With no official heir apparent, the Macedonian military command split, with one side proclaiming Alexander's half-brother Philip III Arrhidaeus (r. 323 – 317 BC) as king and the other siding with the infant son of Alexander and Roxana, Alexander IV (r. 323 – 309 BC). Except for the Euboeans and Boeotians, the Greeks also immediately rose up in a rebellion against Antipater known as the Lamian War (323–322 BC). When Antipater was defeated at the 323 BC Battle of Thermopylae, he fled to Lamia where he was besieged by the Athenian commander Leosthenes. A Macedonian army led by Leonnatus rescued Antipater by lifting the siege. Antipater defeated the rebellion, yet his death in 319 BC left a power vacuum wherein the two proclaimed kings of Macedonia became pawns in a power struggle between the diadochi, the former generals of Alexander's army.A council of the army convened in Babylon immediately after Alexander's death, naming Philip III as king and the chiliarch Perdiccas as his regent. Antipater, Antigonus Monophthalmus, Craterus, and Ptolemy formed a coalition against Perdiccas in a civil war initiated by Ptolemy's seizure of the hearse of Alexander the Great. Perdiccas was assassinated in 321 BC by his own officers during a failed campaign in Egypt against Ptolemy, where his march along the Nile River resulted in the drowning of 2,000 of his men. Although Eumenes of Cardia managed to kill Craterus in battle, this had little to no effect on the outcome of the 321 BC Partition of Triparadisus in Syria where the victorious coalition settled the issue of a new regency and territorial rights. Antipater was appointed as regent over the two kings. Before Antipater died in 319 BC, he named the staunch Argead loyalist Polyperchon as his successor, passing over his own son Cassander and ignoring the right of the king to choose a new regent (since Philip III was considered mentally unstable), in effect bypassing the council of the army as well.Forming an alliance with Ptolemy, Antigonus, and Lysimachus, Cassander had his officer Nicanor capture the Munichia fortress of Athens' port town Piraeus in defiance of Polyperchon's decree that Greek cities should be free of Macedonian garrisons, sparking the Second War of the Diadochi (319–315 BC). Given a string of military failures by Polyperchon, in 317 BC, Philip III, by way of his politically engaged wife Eurydice II of Macedon, officially replaced him as regent with Cassander. Afterwards, Polyperchon desperately sought the aid of Olympias in Epirus. A joint force of Epirotes, Aetolians, and Polyperchon's troops invaded Macedonia and forced the surrender of Philip III and Eurydice's army, allowing Olympias to execute the king and force his queen to commit suicide. Olympias then had Nicanor and dozens of other Macedonian nobles killed, but by the spring of 316 BC, Cassander had defeated her forces, captured her, and placed her on trial for murder before sentencing her to death.Cassander married Philip II's daughter Thessalonike and briefly extended Macedonian control into Illyria as far as Epidamnos. By 313 BC, it was retaken by the Illyrian king Glaucias of Taulantii. By 316 BC, Antigonus had taken the territory of Eumenes and managed to eject Seleucus Nicator from his Babylonian satrapy, leading Cassander, Ptolemy, and Lysimachus to issue a joint ultimatum to Antigonus in 315 BC for him to surrender various territories in Asia. Antigonus promptly allied with Polyperchon, now based in Corinth, and issued an ultimatum of his own to Cassander, charging him with murder for executing Olympias and demanding that he hand over the royal family, King Alexander IV and the queen mother Roxana. The conflict that followed lasted until the winter of 312/311 BC, when a new peace settlement recognized Cassander as general of Europe, Antigonus as "first in Asia", Ptolemy as general of Egypt, and Lysimachus as general of Thrace. Cassander had Alexander IV and Roxana put to death in the winter of 311/310 BC, and by 306–305 BC, the diadochi were declared kings of their respective territories.

Passage: Amyntas III was forced to flee his kingdom in either 393 or 383 BC (based on conflicting accounts), owing to a massive invasion by the Illyrian Dardani led by Bardylis. The pretender to the throne Argaeus ruled in his absence, yet Amyntas III eventually returned to his kingdom with the aid of Thessalian allies. Amyntas III was also nearly overthrown by the forces of the Chalcidian city of Olynthos, but with the aid of Teleutias, brother of the Spartan king Agesilaus II, the Macedonians forced Olynthos to surrender and dissolve their Chalcidian League in 379 BC.Alexander II (r. 370 – 368 BC), son of Eurydice I and Amyntas III, succeeded his father and immediately invaded Thessaly to wage war against the tagus (supreme Thessalian military leader) Alexander of Pherae, capturing the city of Larissa. The Thessalians, desiring to remove both Alexander II and Alexander of Pherae as their overlords, appealed to Pelopidas of Thebes for aid; he succeeded in recapturing Larissa and, in the peace agreement arranged with Macedonia, received aristocratic hostages including Alexander II's brother and future king Philip II (r. 359–336 BC– ). When Alexander was assassinated by his brother-in-law Ptolemy of Aloros, the latter acted as an overbearing regent for Perdiccas III (r. 368 – 359 BC), younger brother of Alexander II, who eventually had Ptolemy executed when reaching the age of majority in 365 BC. The remainder of Perdiccas III's reign was marked by political stability and financial recovery. However, an Athenian invasion led by Timotheus, son of Conon, managed to capture Methone and Pydna, and an Illyrian invasion led by Bardylis succeeded in killing Perdiccas III and 4,000 Macedonian troops in battle.

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: Shackleton's February 1907 announcement that he intended to base his expedition at the old Discovery headquarters was noted by Scott, whose own future Antarctic plans were at that stage unannounced. In a letter to Shackleton, Scott claimed priority rights to McMurdo Sound. "I feel I have a sort of right to my own field of work," he wrote, adding: "anyone who has had to do with exploration will regard this region primarily as mine". He concluded by reminding Shackleton of his duty of loyalty towards his former commander.Shackleton's initial reply was accommodating: "I would like to fall in with your views as far as possible without creating a position that would be untenable to myself". Edward Wilson, asked by Shackleton to mediate, took an even tougher line than Scott. "I think you should retire from McMurdo Sound", he wrote, advising Shackleton not to make any plans to work from anywhere in the entire Ross Sea quarter until Scott decided "what limits he puts on his own rights". To this Shackleton replied: "There is no doubt in my mind that his rights end at the base he asked for [...] I consider I have reached my limit and I go no further".The matter was unresolved when Scott returned from sea duty in May 1907. Scott pressed for a line of demarcation at 170° W—everything to the west of that line, including Ross Island, McMurdo Sound, and Victoria Land, would be Scott's preserve. Shackleton, with other concerns pressing on him, felt obliged to concede. On 17 May he signed a declaration stating that "I am leaving the McMurdo base to you", and that he would seek to land further east, either at the Barrier Inlet visited briefly during the Discovery Expedition, or at King Edward VII Land. He would not touch the coast of Victoria Land at all. It was a capitulation to Scott and Wilson, and meant forfeiting the expedition's aim of reaching the South Magnetic Pole which was located within Victoria Land. Polar historian Beau Riffenburgh believes this was "a promise that should never ethically have been demanded and one that should never have been given, impacting as it might on the entire safety of Shackleton's expedition". The dispute soured relations between the two men (who nevertheless maintained public civilities), and would eventually lead to the complete rupture of Shackleton's formerly close friendship with Wilson.In his own account of the expedition Shackleton makes no reference to the wrangle with Scott. He merely states that "before we finally left England I had decided that if possible I would establish my base in King Edward VII Land instead of [...] McMurdo Sound".

Passage: The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Amundsen's South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton's words, the “one great main object of Antarctic journeyings”.  The expedition failed to accomplish this objective, but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance.
Shackleton had served in the Antarctic on the Discovery Expedition of 1901–1904, and had led the Nimrod Expedition of 1907–1909. In this new venture he proposed to sail to the Weddell Sea and to land a shore party near Vahsel Bay, in preparation for a transcontinental march via the South Pole to the Ross Sea. A supporting group, the Ross Sea party, would meanwhile establish camp in McMurdo Sound, and from there lay a series of supply depots across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. These depots would be essential for the transcontinental party's survival, as the group would not be able to carry enough provisions for the entire crossing. The expedition required two ships: Endurance under Shackleton for the Weddell Sea party, and Aurora, under Aeneas Mackintosh, for the Ross Sea party.
Endurance became beset in the ice of the Weddell Sea before reaching Vahsel Bay, and drifted northward, held in the pack ice, throughout the Antarctic winter of 1915. Eventually the ship was crushed and sunk, stranding its 28-man complement on the ice. After months spent in makeshift camps as the ice continued its northwards drift, the party took to the lifeboats to reach the inhospitable, uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton and five others then made an 800-mile (1,300 km) open-boat journey in the James Caird to reach South Georgia. From there, Shackleton was eventually able to mount a rescue of the men waiting on Elephant Island and bring them home without loss of life. On the other side of the continent, the Ross Sea party overcame great hardships to fulfil its mission. Aurora was blown from her moorings during a gale and was unable to return, leaving the shore party marooned without proper supplies or equipment. Nevertheless, the depots were laid, but three lives were lost before the party's eventual rescue.

Passage: To lead the Ross Sea party Shackleton chose Aeneas Mackintosh, having first attempted to persuade the Admiralty to provide him with a naval crew. Mackintosh, like Shackleton, was a former Merchant Navy officer, who had been on the Nimrod expedition until his participation was cut short by an accident that resulted in the loss of his right eye. Another Nimrod veteran, Ernest Joyce, whose Antarctic experiences had begun with Captain Scott's Discovery Expedition, was appointed to take charge of sledging and dogs.  Joyce was described by Shackleton's biographer, Roland Huntford, as "a strange mixture of fraud, flamboyance and ability", but his depot-laying work during the Nimrod expedition had impressed Shackleton. Ernest Wild, a Royal Naval petty officer, was added to the party possibly through the persuasion of his brother, Frank Wild, who was travelling as Shackleton's second-in-command on Endurance.Some of the appointments to the party were made rather hurriedly, reflecting the limited time frame that Shackleton had allowed for preliminary organisation. Joseph Stenhouse, a young officer from the British India Steam Navigation Company, was appointed as the Aurora's First Officer after travelling from Australia to London to seek an interview with Shackleton. The Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, a Scottish Episcopal Church priest and former schoolmaster, joined as a replacement for one of the original members of the expedition who had left for active service in the First World War. Victor Hayward, a London finance clerk with a taste for adventure was recruited on the basis of his having worked on a ranch in Canada.Although the Ross Sea party's main role was to lay supply depots, Shackleton added a small scientific team to carry out biological, meteorological and magnetic research in the region.  The chief scientist in this group was Alexander Stevens, a Scots geologist and former theology student. John Cope, a 21-year-old Cambridge graduate, was the team's biologist; a would-be medical student, he later became ship's surgeon. Two other scientists were appointed in Australia, the physicist Dick Richards (who signed up for a nominal wage of £1 per week) and industrial chemist Keith Jack. An Australian cousin of Spencer-Smith's, Irvine Gaze, was taken on as a general assistant.

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 1940, a replacement, Pilot Officer T. B. "Septic" Baird, is landing his Hawker Hurricane at "Pimpernel" Squadron's airfield. Just as he touches down, however, a straggler from an earlier mission taxis across his path. Septic's quick reactions allow him to "leapfrog" the other Hurricane, averting a costly disaster. His action, however, causes him to crash his replacement aircraft into the bungalow of Squadron Leader Barry Clinton at the end of the runway.
This earns Septic the wrath of his new squadron leader, Bill Ponsford, because he damaged his fighter aircraft. The crash also injures the ligaments in Septic's neck, which he is able to self-diagnose, as he had been a medical student before the war. The next morning, Septic is told by Group Captain "Tiger" Small that he will not be able to fly until his neck is healed, so he will instead serve in the operations room for the time being.
Several days later, with the risk of a bombing attack on the airfield, and all of Pimpernel Squadron's Hurricanes scrambled, Tiger orders all aircraft to take off and fly out of harm's way until the raid is over. With Tiger quickly assembling all available pilots and finding aircraft to fly, Septic wins a foot race with Small to claim the last spare Hurricane for himself. He then proceeds to shoot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 from the attacking force. His delight is short lived however when he is admonished by Small and Sqn Ldr Peter Moon for leaving his radio set to transmit, preventing the returning Hurricanes from being diverted to an undamaged airfield. A crestfallen Septic returns to his ground duties.

Passage: Pilots Philo and George are about to land a plane, only for Philo to accidentally knock out his contact lenses, causing the plane to malfunction and crash into a skyscraper. The destruction is then revealed to be a simulator and the duo was taking an exam in pilot school, causing the two to be attrited for unsatisfactory performance. Unemployed and out of options, they enroll in Weidermeyer Academy, one of the top stewardess schools in the country. George and Philo get put in a group full of misfits, including a lady wrestler whose fiance got cold feet, a frumpy overweight girl, an ex-prostitute whose probation officer arranged for her to enroll in Weidermeyer as part of a work-release program, a gay man, and an extremely clumsy woman. The group has standard classes about emergencies, etiquette, and antiterrorism, which they work through. Also as part of a test is a full-sized replica of an airplane with people to wait on, and some difficult people are selected such as a bratty little kid, a group of middle aged drunks, and surly ex-NFL player who refuses George's orders not to smoke. The group starts to gel together, with George learning to start applying himself to a career and Philo finding common ground with the "jinx girl" due to his similar eye problems.

Passage: In 1943, a bombing mission by a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress that had successfully dropped its bombs on target, has degenerated into an emergency situation over the Pacific. The navigator on board has not been able to plot a course back to the bomber's home base. The lives of the crew and the loss of the bomber depends on the skill and training provided for the navigator who represents a "weak link" in the crew.
The one solution to a lack of readiness to go to war in the air is the selection, testing, training and preparation offered by the Army Air Forces Officer Candidate School found in Miami, Florida. The motto of the school is Sustineo Alas (translated as "I sustain the wings"). The selection and testing to qualify is rigorous; after a physical examination, test scores based on general knowledge, and a stint as a corporal in command of soldiers, only 23 out of 1,000 candidates are chosen to proceed to the Officer's Candidate School.
All of the candidates have a diverse background and experiences, some as entertainers such as Robert Preston, while others have been successful in sports, business, science and academia. Many have also had combat experience as well as leadership positions. The twelve-week course stresses discipline, efficiency and restrictions that combine to instil all the attitudes and ethos of the officer cadre.

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.