Question:
Passage: John May is a man struggling with loneliness who works the Bona Vacantia office in the Kennington Town Hall in London, where his main responsibility is locating the next of kin of people found dead in the district with no will and testament. Most cases are open-and-shut due to lack of leads, but when heirs are located, he regularly finds them hesitant to accept the deceased's personal property, and so has taken the practice of offering to organize the funeral himself, paid for by district government, writing an eulogy for each deceased, as an incentive. His boss finds this practice time-consuming and expensive, and so has decided to close his office down once he completes one final case: the death of William Stoke.
Inspecting Stoke's apartment, his sole lead are a series of photographs—one of them of a pork pie factory. He visits it and obtains from one of the workers, who remembers Stoke, the address of Stoke's first lover. The now old and temperamental woman wants nothing to do with Stoke, giving John the impression Stoke cheated on her with the lady who owned a fish and chips restaurant that Stoke frequented. John travels to where Stoke was living at the time and checks all the fish and chips in town until he locates Stoke's second lover, Mary; her daughter, Kelly; and granddaughter.
Mary tells John that they cannot be considered Stoke's kin as "he never wanted a family." She does, however, tell him he abandoned them and landed in prison. At the prison, a guard leads John to some letters Stoke never mailed, where he find's Kelly's address and visits her without Mary's knowledge. Kelly is taken aback to hear her father is dead, but cuts John off when he tries to offer to organize the funeral, sending him instead to Jumbo: a man that served in the military alongside Stoke.

Passage: Prominent criminal attorney Amos Strickland checks into the Lost Caverns Resort Hotel. His murdered body is later discovered by the bellboy, Freddie Phillips, who is implicated in the crime. Casey Edwards, the house detective, tries to clear Freddie, but Inspector Wellman and Sgt. Stone keep him in custody at his hotel room 'on the state'.
Strickland's secretary Gregory Millford and seven of Strickland's former clients happen to be at the resort, and they are all suspects. These former clients are Swami Talpur, Angela Gordon, Mrs. Hargreave, T. Hanley Brooks, Lawrence Crandall, Mrs. Grimsby and Mike Relia.
The bodies of Relia and the secretary Gregory Millford are found in Freddie's closet, and he and Casey try to move them and hide them.  The former clients gather for a meeting and decide that they must conceal their pasts and that Freddie must take the blame for the three murders. They trick Freddie into signing a confession, and then want him dead. Angela tries to seduce him, but the police stop her when they fear she's poisoned the champagne, then the Swami attempts to hypnotize him into committing suicide but his stupidity saves him.

Passage: American Paul Banner used to be a reporter working in London. Recently leaving his paper, he has gone freelance, so that he can focus more on chasing down facts and selling his stories once he gets them. He has no regrets in leaving his job as there will be no more deadlines or misguided editors to divert his attention. He starts up a news agency, Banners Agency, whose motto is "ferret out the facts and sell them to the highest bidder."
When showgirl Nina Duke is murdered, the press are all harrying the police for statements and facts but Banner hangs back and does a little work of his own to uncover the story. Nina, it transpires, was previously in jail for blackmail, so it is possible that this was why she was killed. Banner initially falls for the affections of rival reporter Pam Barnes, but his true affections lie with his secretary, Maxine (Hazel Court.
A race to find the killer has Banner trying to get the story that the police cannot.

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: Trudie is an aspiring painter working as a restaurant waitress. With the pressure to please her parents (Timothy Bottoms and Markie Post) building, she misses a job interview and gets dumped by her boyfriend just before Christmas, and she has a nervous breakdown. Stressed about going home for the holidays without a boyfriend, she kidnaps David Martin, a random customer at the restaurant in which she works and introduces him to her parents as her boyfriend, Nick.  Trudie's family is vacationing at a very isolated log cabin miles away from anyone else, so David is unable to escape, although he makes several attempts. He finally decides to play along until the police come, but he ultimately falls in love with Trudie and understands the family pressure that made her feel forced to kidnap him in the first place.
During Christmas dinner, the holiday comes to an abrupt end when Trudie's parents begin to fight, her brother Jake announces that he is gay, and her sister Katie says that she has quit law school and bought a pilates studio with her parents' tuition money. The police then arrive and arrest the family during Christmas dinner, revealing that David Martin is not actually Trudie's boyfriend.
Before he was kidnapped, David had a successful job and a beautiful, rich girlfriend; however, during his time with Trudie and her family, he realizes his life has developed into something he did not intend. After the family is released, except Grandma Dolores because she tired resist arrest, when David decides not to press charges, Trudie does not see or hear from David for a few months, but sees his engagement announcement in the newspaper.

Passage: The story follows the life of the 35-year-old Melody Parris (Played by Mimi Rogers), a skilled perfume girl, who is living a somewhat flavorless life in Seattle, with a pompous, pushy boyfriend named George and an overbearing mother who lives right next door to her, who is obsessed with her getting married.
It starts with another unsatisfactory day at work for Melody, but on the bus, her best friend Naomi tells her to make a Christmas list for selfish fun. She starts to but then receives a call from George, who is on a flight home from a business trip.
During a talk with her mother that evening, she asks her if they could try to make their Christmas "Dickens-Style"; however her mother is reluctant to do this. Another neighbor's daughter, Amber Mottola, is a supermodel, and her mother harps on how Melody's sister is married, and so Melody storms out, saying that she's sorry she's not anything that makes her mother proud, missing her mother saying that she is proud.
The next day at work, Melody is passed over for a promotion to the head of the perfume department at the department store where she works for a younger, less skilled co-worker, April May, whose main objective is to sell, not to serve. Melody finally decides to finish her Christmas list, and the next day, she takes it to work and (after some playfulness with Naomi) Naomi puts it in Santa's Mailbox at the department store. Then, things begin to change. She meets Danny Skylar, a boy who wants to buy a perfume that was similar to the smell of his late mother's, and when he can't pay the full amount, Melody loans him the rest, and he puts her name, along with his, on the entry form in a sweepstakes at the store to win a new Ford Mustang convertible.

Passage: Japanese bride Midori Takada arrives in Sydney with her new husband Yukio. She believes her marriage is a mistake and uses the honeymoon as a means to escape. Colin O'Brien is an experienced getaway driver. He is hired by an Australian-Afghan family to help rob a bank. During the robbery one member is killed. Midori is in the bank at the same time and they grab her as a hostage. After escaping, the two Afghan brothers decide to get rid of her. Colin will not allow this. He kills one of the brothers and threatens to shoot the other, Mahood. He and Midori escape.
Colin wishes to travel to see his father, Cam, at his ranch because he hasn't seen him in years. Midori chooses to stay with Colin. The duo rob a bank to fund their trip. Mahood and his father, Boorjan, swear revenge and set out to catch Colin. The police, aware of the Afghani family's illegal activities, are also in pursuit. Yukio is told of his wife's involvement and he is aware that she left him by choice. His honor injured, he goes to find her.
Colin and Midori venture across New South Wales. The Afghans catch up with Colin and begin to torture him, but Colin manages to kill the patriarch and remaining son. Yukio searches for Midori, killing people along the way. Colin and Midori eventually reach the ranch owned by his father, Cam. The duo stays for a short while and officially become lovers. They then leave to visit the seashore.

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: At the end of the 19th century, several forms of industrial development shaped Minnesota.  In 1882, a hydroelectric power plant was built at Saint Anthony Falls, marking one of the first developments of hydroelectric power in the United States.  Iron mining began in northern Minnesota with the opening of the Soudan Mine in 1884.  The Vermilion Range was surveyed and mapped by a party financed by Charlemagne Tower.  Another mining town, Ely began with the foundation of the Chandler Mine in 1888.  Soon after, the Mesabi Range was established when ore was found just under the surface of the ground in Mountain Iron.  The Mesabi Range ultimately had much more ore than the Vermilion Range, and it was easy to extract because the ore was closer to the surface.  As a result, open-pit mines became well-established on the Mesabi Range, with 111 mines operating by 1904.  To ship the iron ore to refineries, railroads such as the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway were built from the iron ranges to Two Harbors and Duluth on Lake Superior.  Large ore docks were used at these cities to load the iron ore onto ships for transport east on the Great Lakes.  The mining industry helped to propel Duluth from a small town to a large, thriving city.  In 1904, iron was discovered in the Cuyuna Range in Crow Wing County.  Between 1904 and 1984, when mining ceased, more than 106 million tons of ore were mined.  Iron from the Cuyuna Range also contained significant proportions of manganese, increasing its value.

Passage: Saint Anthony Falls, the only waterfall of its height on the Mississippi, played an important part in the development of Minneapolis.  The power of the waterfall first fueled sawmills, but later it was tapped to serve flour mills.  In 1870, only a small number of flour mills were in the Minneapolis area, but by 1900 Minnesota mills were grinding 14.1% of the nation's grain.  Advances in transportation, milling technology, and water power combined to give Minneapolis a dominance in the milling industry.  Spring wheat could be sown in the spring and harvested in late summer, but it posed special problems for milling.  To get around these problems, Minneapolis millers made use of new technology.  They invented the middlings purifier, a device that used jets of air to remove the husks from the flour early in the milling process.  They also started using roller mills, as opposed to grindstones.  A series of rollers gradually broke down the kernels and integrated the gluten with the starch.  These improvements led to the production of "patent" flour, which commanded almost double the price of "bakers" or "clear" flour, which it replaced. Pillsbury and the Washburn-Crosby Company (a forerunner of General Mills) became the leaders in the Minneapolis milling industry.  This leadership in milling later declined as milling was no longer dependent on water power, but the dominance of the mills contributed greatly to the economy of Minneapolis and Minnesota, attracting people and money to the region.

Passage: Henry Hastings Sibley built the first stone house in the Minnesota Territory in Mendota in 1838, along with other limestone buildings used by the American Fur Company, which bought animal pelts at that location from 1825 to 1853.  Another area of early economic development in Minnesota was the logging industry.  Loggers found the white pine especially valuable, and it was plentiful in the northeastern section of the state and in the St. Croix River valley.  Before railroads, lumbermen relied mostly on river transportation to bring logs to market, which made Minnesota's timber resources attractive.  Towns like Pine City, Marine on St. Croix and Stillwater became important lumber centers fed by the St. Croix River, while Winona was supplied lumber by areas in southern Minnesota and along the Minnesota River. The unregulated logging practices of the time and a severe drought took their toll in 1894, when the Great Hinckley Fire ravaged 480 square miles (1,200 km2) in the Hinckley and Sandstone areas of Pine County, killing over 400 residents. The combination of logging and drought struck again in the Baudette Fire of 1910 and the Cloquet Fire of 1918.
Saint Anthony, on the east bank of the Mississippi River later became part of Minneapolis, and was an important lumber milling center supplied by the Rum River.  In 1848, businessman Franklin Steele built the first private sawmill on the Saint Anthony Falls, and more sawmills quickly followed. The oldest home still standing in Saint Anthony is the Ard Godfrey house, built in 1848, and lived in by Ard and Harriet Godfrey.  The house of John H. Stevens, the first house on the west bank in Minneapolis, was moved several times, finally to Minnehaha Park in south Minneapolis in 1896.

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: Drama critic John Earl observes a piece of artwork in a museum, gazing at it reverently. He asks the museum curator how much it costs, and the curator says that it is not for sale. The artist, James Harlan Corbin [Lederer], does not wish to sell the painting. Nonplussed, Earl returns to his office and phones Corbin with his proposal to sell. Again, Corbin refuses. Earl continues his pursuit to find out who the model for the painting was. He learns it is Helen North, a young woman who looks nothing like the woman in the painting. He visits with her to learn his location, but she refuses, telling him that she will be singing at a local nightclub, where Corbin frequents. Earl finds both of them in the museum, and again confronts Corbin. Becoming clearly annoyed, Corbin invites the singer out for a night in his yacht. She agrees, but is later found washed ashore. Although Police Lt. Roberts initially questions Helen's suitor Hunt Mason, Mason implicates Corbin as the last person who saw Helen North. John Earl works with the police department to arrange for Helen's sister Linda to apply for modeling, in order to spy on Corbin. The two return to Corbin's boathouse. While there, Linda calls for Earl and tells his chef that she is in danger and to notify the police. There, she learns that Corbin did not murder her sister. Thereafter, she falls in love with Corbin and agrees to support him against the district attorney's allegations he killed both Helen and another model, Madonna. Although Corbin has visions that he did so, Linda tells him to make sure he is telling the truth before confessing such heinous crimes. Linda returns home with Corbin's mother, who poisons her tea and tries to inject her with a lethal substance before police shoot. Corbin had suddenly recognized who it was that had planted evidence at the boathouse to implicate him. Police arrive just in time to save Linda from death but not Mrs. Corbin, who dies in her son's arms.

Passage: Home from the war, Captain Tony Travis eyes an estate in Santa Barbara and wonders what it must be like to be that rich. It is the property of the fabulously wealthy Nora Hunter, who has secretary and friend Sylvia Lockwood impersonate her in public. Longtime guardian Jonathan Connors protects his ward's privacy zealously. During a ship launching, a press photographer takes Nora's picture, but Connors sees to it that the camera film is ruined.
Sylvia tells Nora that she is quitting so that she can accompany her husband, Phil Vernon, whose job requires him to move to Washington. Nora decides to marry her fiance Donald so that Sylvia can be her maid of honor at her wedding, but when Donald returns from military duty, he breaks the news that he has fallen in love with someone else.
Nora hosts a tea, but has Sylvia again pretend to be her. There she meets and takes a liking to Tony, but he is more interested in Sylvia. On hearing him vow that love is more important to him than money, Nora and Sylvia invite him to a weekend at Nora's beach house. Nora helps Tony court Sylvia, so that if he does genuinely love the real Nora, it will not be because of her money. All of her friends tell her she is being foolish, that nobody can resist that much temptation, but she stubbornly persists.

Passage: A young woman named Arletty drives to the beach town of Point Dume, California, to visit her estranged father, an artist. She finds his beachfront house, abandoned. He left a diary in which he addresses her specifically. In it he complains about darkness consuming the town, and horrible nightmares he is having, and implores Arletty to never, ever look for him. His letter tells her to talk to the owner of the art gallery, who sells his paintings. The gallery owner says he has none of her father's paintings, does not sell them, no one ever comes in looking to buy his works, and says he doesn't know where he went. He says Point Dune is "an artist colony" and he only vaguely remembers her father (his paintings are eerie pop art portraits of groups of people in black, white, and gray, standing; the men are always dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties, like dead men at a funeral). It is never clear if these are townspeople, or figures from his visions, or both.
Arletty meets a visiting Portuguese-American aristocrat Thom and his two extremely provocative, groupie-like female companions, Toni and Laura. Back at his motel, Thom interviews Charlie, (Elisha Cook, Jr.) the local town eccentric. Charlie speaks at length about "the blood moon" and "the dark stranger" and how he has lived through both. He says very soon it will be the 100 year anniversary of the first appearance of the "dark stranger." He will return, the moon will turn red, and the town will be overrun with evil. Charlie warns Arletty about her father, he says he is "one of them" now. Moments later he is murdered off screen.

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: When Todd Anderson (played by Quran Pender) has just signed a 5-year/$30 million contract with his hometown basketball team the New Jersey Nets, he purchases many new luxuries for himself and his family including a new house in a well established, high class neighborhood for him and his gold digging girlfriend Brittany (played by Meagan Good). Keeping with family tradition, he decides to host a regular family reunion cookout in his new place, however, not planning for it to clash with an important business meeting for an endorsement deal.
Meanwhile, Bling Bling (played by Ja Rule) is jealous that Todd has made it with his basketball contract after being insulted and embarrassed in front of the neighborhood when Todd did not recognize who he was. He plans to get many pairs of sneakers signed by the upcoming star to sell on eBay and become rich. Whilst on his way to Todd's new house, he crashes his car due to his clumsy friend and then tries to steal a new Mercedes from a car park without realizing the car belongs to Todd's girlfriend Brittany. After finding out he holds her at gunpoint and forces her to drive him there.
Although the meeting is scheduled to take place in the morning, and the guests are to arrive in the afternoon, one by one members of Todd's eccentric family begin to arrive before expected disrupting his business interview. The neighbors are drawn to the cookout, and Todd is concerned mainly about his image, as his family's antics are making a poor impression on his neighbors.
When Bling Bling and his criminal sidekick invade the cookout so they can get Todd's autograph, the ensuing chaos makes Todd realize how much he needs his family. He realizes that he loves the family for the way they are and gets a shock by the endorsement interviewer. Todd breaks up with Brittney and marries Becky and scores 26 points in his debut in New Jersey.

Passage: Kevin Carson (Bow Wow) is a young man living in the projects with his grandmother. Kevin dreams of one day designing his own sneaker line, but currently works at Foot Locker.  His dreams are supported by two of his best friends: Benny and Stacey.  He comes across Lorenzo, the neighborhood bully. Meanwhile, everyone in his neighborhood is trying to win the Mondo Million Dollar Lottery of $370 million. Lorenzo demands that Kevin gives him and his three friends three sets of sneakers each for free. When Lorenzo shows up to Kevin's job at Foot Locker, and grabs the shoes, the alarms go off and the police arrive, after Lorenzo claims Kevin gave him the shoes as a gift, he attempts to explain to the police that he did not intend to give the shoes to Lorenzo, Lorenzo is arrested for shoplifting and Kevin loses his job.

Passage: This movie was inspired by a true story, following the life of a thug being released from prison after an 8 year prison sentence. In the beginning of the movie "G," who is played by The Game, leaves prison determined to not be locked up again. It doesn't take long for the streets to pull G in again, and he meets a lady named Alexis. However, both are hiding their secret lives (G being a hustler, Alexis being an undercover cop), who discusses 150 kilos of cocaine that G and Tone stole, which belonged to drug lord Tito Costa.
Coleman kidnaps Alexis and takes her to Costa. Coleman calls G to let him know his girlfriend has been kidnapped. G then gathers up his men and heads to Costa's garage, where a gun battle ensues. After the fight is over, all of G's and Tito's men are dead or injured.  G's right hand man kill Tito,Coleman shoot G's right hand man, G kill Coleman and then finds out that Alexis is an undercover cop. He then kills her. G walk off and want to start a new life in a good path and G's men who survived  also want to start a new life too after they come out of the hospital.

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: Before the first gramophone disc recordings of The Rite were issued in 1929, Stravinsky had helped to produce a pianola version of the work for the London branch of the Aeolian Company. He also created a much more comprehensive arrangement for the Pleyela, manufactured by the French piano company Pleyel, with whom he signed two contracts in April and May 1921, under which many of his early works were reproduced on this medium. The Pleyela version of The Rite of Spring was issued in 1921; the British pianolist Rex Lawson first recorded the work in this form in 1990.In 1929 Stravinsky and Monteux vied with each other to conduct the first orchestral gramophone recording of The Rite. While Stravinsky led L'Orchestre des Concerts Straram in a recording for the Columbia label, at the same time Monteux was recording it for the HMV label. Stokowski's version followed in 1930. Stravinsky made two more recordings, in 1940 and 1960. According to the critic Edward Greenfield, Stravinsky was not technically a great conductor but, Greenfield says, in the 1960 recording with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra the composer inspired a performance with "extraordinary thrust and resilience". In conversations with Robert Craft, Stravinsky reviewed several recordings of The Rite made in the 1960s. He thought Herbert von Karajan's 1963 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, was good, but "the performance is ... too polished, a pet savage rather than a real one". Stravinsky thought that Pierre Boulez, with the Orchestre National de France (1963), was "less good than I had hoped ... very bad tempi and some tasteless alterations". He praised a 1962 recording by The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra   for making the music sound Russian, "which is just right", but Stravinsky's concluding judgement was that none of these three performances was worth preserving.As of 2013 there were well over 100 different recordings of The Rite commercially available, and many more held in library sound archives. It has become one of the most recorded of all 20th century musical works.

Passage: Igor Stravinsky was the son of Fyodor Stravinsky, the principal bass singer at the Imperial Opera, St Petersburg, and Anna, née Kholodovskaya, a competent amateur singer and pianist from an old-established Russian family. Fyodor's association with many of the leading figures in Russian music, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, meant that Igor grew up in an intensely musical home. In 1901 Stravinsky began to study law at Saint Petersburg University while taking private lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Stravinsky worked under the guidance of Rimsky-Korsakov, having impressed him with some of his early compositional efforts. By the time of his mentor's death in 1908 Stravinsky had produced several works, among them a Piano Sonata in F♯ minor (1903–04), a Symphony in E♭ major (1907), which he catalogued as "Opus 1", and a short orchestral piece, Feu d'artifice ("Fireworks", composed in 1908).In 1909 Feu d'artifice was performed at a concert in St. Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world. In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris; in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. To present these works Diaghilev recruited the choreographer Michel Fokine, the designer Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev's intention, however, was to produce new works in a distinctively 20th-century style, and he was looking for fresh compositional talent. Having heard Feu d'artifice he approached Stravinsky, initially with a request for help in orchestrating music by Chopin to create the ballet Les Sylphides. Stravinsky worked on the opening "Nocturne" and the closing "Valse Brillante"; his reward was a much bigger commission, to write the music for a new ballet, The Firebird (L'oiseau de feu) for the 1910 season.Stravinsky worked through the winter of 1909–10, in close association with Fokine who was choreographing The Firebird. During this period Stravinsky made the acquaintance of Nijinsky who, although not dancing in the ballet, was a keen observer of its development. Stravinsky was uncomplimentary when recording his first impressions of the dancer, observing that he seemed immature and gauche for his age (he was 21). On the other hand, Stravinsky found Diaghilev an inspiration, "the very essence of a great personality". The Firebird was premiered on 25 June 1910, with Tamara Karsavina in the main role, and was a great public success. This ensured that the Diaghilev–Stravinsky collaboration would continue, in the first instance with Petrushka (1911) and then The Rite of Spring.

Passage: Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (Russian: Дми́трий Дми́триевич Шостако́вич , tr. Dmitriy Dmitrievich Shostakovich, pronounced [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ˈdmʲitrʲɪjɪvʲɪtɕ ʂəstɐˈkovʲɪtɕ]; 25 September [O.S. 12 September] 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Nevertheless, he received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947) and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from 1962 until his death).
A polystylist, Shostakovich developed a hybrid voice, combining a variety of different musical techniques into his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; the composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.
Shostakovich's orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti. His chamber output includes 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, two piano trios, and two pieces for string octet. His solo piano works include two sonatas, an early set of preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Other works include three operas, several song cycles, ballets, and a substantial quantity of film music; especially well known is The Second Waltz, Op. 99, music to the film The First Echelon (1955–1956), as well as the suites of music composed for The Gadfly.

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 postwar period also saw the beginning of Bush's 20-year involvement with grand opera, a genre in which, although he achieved little commercial recognition, he was retrospectively hailed by critics as a master of British opera second only to Britten. His first venture, Wat Tyler, was  written in a form which Bush thought acceptable to the general British public; it was not his choice, he wrote, that the opera and its successors all found their initial audiences in East Germany.  When eventually staged in Britain in 1974 the opera, although well received at Sadler's Wells, seemed somewhat old-fashioned; Philip Hope-Wallace in The Guardian thought the ending degenerated into "a choral union cantata", and found the music pleasant but not especially memorable. Bush's three other major operas were all characterised by their use of "local" music: Northumbrian folk-song in the case of Men of Blackmoor, Guyanese songs and dances in The Sugar Reapers, and American folk music in Joe Hill –  the last-named used in a manner reminiscent of Kurt Weill and the German opera with which Bush had become familiar in the  early 1930s.The extent to which Bush's music  changed substantially after the war was addressed by Meirion Bowen, reviewing a Bush concert in the 1980s. Bowen noted a distinct contrast between early and late works, the former showing primarily the influences of Ireland and of Bush's European contacts, while in the later pieces the idiom was "often overtly folklike and Vaughan Williams-ish".  In general Bush's late works continued to show all the hallmarks of his postwar oeuvre: vigour, clarity of tone and  masterful use of counterpoint. The Lascaux symphony, written when he was 83, is the composer's final major orchestral statement, and addresses deep philosophical issues relating to the origins and destiny of mankind.

Passage: Despite undergoing various changes of emphasis, Bush's music retained a voice distinct from that of any of his contemporaries. One critic describes the typical Bush sound as "Mild dominant discords, of consonant effect, used with great originality in uncommon progressions alive with swift, purposeful harmonic movement ... except in [Benjamin] Britten they are nowhere used with more telling expression, colour and sense of movement than in Bush".John Ireland, Bush's early mentor, instilled "the sophisticated and restrained craftsmanship which marked Bush's music from the beginning",   introducing him to folksong and Palestrina, both important building blocks in the development of Bush's mature style. Daula comments that "Bush's music does not [merely] imitate the sound-world of his Renaissance predecessors", but   creates his unique fingerprint by "[juxtaposing] 16th century modal counterpoint with late- and post-romantic harmony".Bush's music, at least from the mid-1930s, often carried political overtones. His obituarist Rupert Christiansen writes that, as a principled Marxist, Bush  "put the requirements of the revolutionary proletariat at the head of the composer's responsibilities", a choice which others, such as Tippett, chose not to make.   However, Vaughan Williams thought that, despite Bush's oft-declared theories of the purposes of art and music, "when the inspiration comes over him he forgets all about this and remembers only the one eternal rule for all artists, 'To thine own self be true'.".

Passage: Holst's settings of Indian texts formed only a part of his compositional output in the period 1900 to 1914. A highly significant factor in his musical development was the English folksong revival, evident in the orchestral suite A Somerset Rhapsody (1906–07), a work that was originally to be based around eleven folksong themes; this was later reduced to four. Observing the work's kinship with Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody, Dickinson remarks that, with its firm overall structure, Holst's composition "rises beyond the level of ... a song-selection". Imogen acknowledges that Holst's discovery of English folksongs "transformed his orchestral writing", and that the composition of A Somerset Rhapsody did much to banish the chromaticisms that had dominated his early compositions. In the Two Songs without Words of 1906, Holst showed that he could create his own original music using the folk idiom. An orchestral folksong fantasy Songs of the West, also written in 1906, was withdrawn by the composer and never published, although it emerged in the 1980s in the form of an arrangement for wind band by James Curnow.
In the years before the First World War, Holst composed in a variety of genres. Matthews considers the evocation of a North African town in the Beni Mora suite of 1908 the composer's most individual work to that date; the third movement gives a preview of minimalism in its constant repetition of a four-bar theme. Holst wrote two suites for military band, in E flat (1909) and F major (1911) respectively, the first of which became and remains a brass-band staple. This piece, a highly original and substantial musical work, was a signal departure from what Short describes as "the usual transcriptions and operatic selections which pervaded the band repertoire". Also in 1911 he wrote Hecuba's Lament, a setting of Gilbert Murray's translation from Euripides built on a seven-beat refrain designed, says Dickinson, to represent Hecuba's defiance of divine wrath. In 1912 Holst composed two psalm settings, in which he experimented with plainsong; the same year saw the enduringly popular St Paul's Suite (a "gay but retrogressive" piece according to Dickinson), and the failure of his large scale orchestral work Phantastes.

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 songs such as "Overcome" and "Suffocated Love" dealt with themes of "sexual paranoia and male dread of intimacy", the rest of Maxinquaye explored the psychological tolls of the British recreational drug culture, which Reynolds said served as a "temporary utopia" for a generation of users who otherwise lacked a "constructive outlet for its idealism". He felt the album's cover art, featuring rusting metal surfaces, represented the cultural decline explored in the music's themes. Tricky drew on Rastafarian ideas about end time for the record, although unlike adherents to that movement he did not disassociate himself from "Babylon", or the degenerate qualities of Western society, writing lyrics such as "my brain thinks bomb-like/beware of our appetite" on "Hell Is Round the Corner". He later told Reynolds, "I'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution ... It's like, I can be as greedy as you. The conditioned part of me says 'yeah, I'm gonna go out and make money, I'm going to rule my own little kingdom.'" Christgau deemed the album's songs "audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check", while O'Hagan said Tricky's "impressionistic prose poems" were written from the deviant perspective of the urban hedonist: "Maxinquaye is the sound of blunted Britain, paranoid and obsessive ... This was the inner-city blues, Bristol style".The songs "Ponderosa", "Strugglin'", and "Hell Is Round the Corner" were inspired by Tricky's experiences with marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and ecstasy, particularly a two-year binge and consequent state of despondency while on Massive Attack's payroll after the completion of Blue Lines. His stream-of-consciousness lyrics on Maxinquaye explore the delirious, despondent, and emotionally unstable state associated with drug use while offering a pessimistic view of the drug culture, as Tricky viewed the high of cocaine undeserved and the depth of thought achieved through ecstasy unsubstantial. In Reynolds' opinion, Tricky's experiences with drug-induced paranoia, anxiety, and visions of spectres and demons were represented in the production of songs such as "Aftermath" and "Hell Is Round the Corner". For the latter track, he altered and slowed down a vocal sample to give it a wounded basso profondo sound, while channelling it through a loop of an orchestral Isaac Hayes recording, "Ike's Rap II". On "Strugglin'", which sampled sounds of a creaking door and the click of a gun being loaded, Tricky's lyrics made explicit reference to his visions of "mystical shadows, fraught with no meaning".

Passage: Tricky explained Maxinquaye's title in an interview with Simon Reynolds: "Quaye, that's this race of people in Africa, and 'Maxin,' that's my mum's name, Maxine, and I've just taken the E off"; Reynolds interpreted this as a "place name" similar to the Rastafarian idea of Zion. In another source, Tricky was reported as saying Quaye had also been his mother's surname. According to Greg Kot, his mother's name provided the album its title while her suicide, along with his father abandoning him and Tricky's lack of moral sense as a youth, helped inform his "unsentimental grasp on reality", which was reflected in Maxinquaye's "collision of beauty and violence". In the opinion of Stylus Magazine's Kenan Hebert, who called it "a document of obsession, mistrust, misconduct, solipsism, and sociopathy", the songs dealing with dysfunctional sexual relationships and fear of intimacy were given a Freudian angle by his mother's influence on the album, including Tricky's reference to her on "Aftermath". In an interview for The Wire, Tricky explained his mother's influence and his use of female vocalists like Topley-Bird: "My first lyric ever on a song was 'your eyes resemble mine, you'll see as no others can'. I didn't have any kids then ... so what am I talking about? Who am I talking about? My mother ... used to write poetry but in her time she couldn't have done anything with that, there wasn't any opportunity. It's almost like she killed herself to give me the opportunity, my lyrics. I can never understand why I write as a female, I think I've got my mum's talent, I'm her vehicle. So I need a woman to sing that.".

Passage: "Jihad"—alongside fellow Christ Illusion album tracks "Eyes of the Insane" and "Cult"—was made available for streaming on June 26, 2006, via the Spanish website Rafabasa.com. The album was Slayer's ninth studio recording, and was released on August 8, 2006. During reviews "Jihad" received a mixed reception.
Blabbermouth's Don Kaye gave the opinion that "a handful of songs" on Christ Illusion "are either too generic or the arrangements are too clumsy to work well", and specifically singled out the track: "I'm looking at you, 'Jihad' and 'Skeleton Christ'." Ben Ratliff of New York Times remarked that the song is "predictably tough stuff, but let's put it on a scale. It is tougher, and less reasoned, than Martin Amis's recent short story 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.' It is no tougher than a taped message from Al Qaeda." Peter Atkinson of KNAC.com was equally unimpressed, describing the group's choice of song climax as:
..the same sort of detached, matter-of-fact tactic Hanneman and Araya have employed for "difficult" subjects in the past—Josef Mengele's Nazi atrocities in "Angel of Death" or Jeffrey Dahmer/Ed Gein's ghoulish proclivities in "213" and "Dead Skin Mask"—with great effect. But here it feels atypically crass and exploitative, as if it was done purely to get a rise out of people... And Slayer's usually a lot more clever than that.
Not all reviews were so negative. Thom Jurek of Allmusic observed that "the band begins to enter and twist and turn looking for a place to create a new rhythmic thrash that's the most insane deconstruction of four/four time on tape." The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov asked readers to "listen to the eerie, stop-start cadence of lunacy in 'Jihad,' with Araya playing the role of a suicide bomber almost too convincingly."King would have appointed "Jihad" as the group's nomination in the "Best Metal Performance" award category at the 49th Grammy Awards, deeming the chosen track "Eyes of the Insane" "the poorest representations" of the group on ninth studio album Christ Illusion. Despite King's statement, "Eyes of the Insane" won Slayer their first Grammy award. The Slayer guitarist has also stated; "I like playing 'Jihad' because I'm back changing my guitars, and Jeff starts it and he starts it quietly so you can hear the fans go crazy about it and you can't always hear that at the beginning of a song.".

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: Bitter war widow Janet Ames seeks out the five soldiers for whom her husband gave his life by falling on a hand grenade during the Battle of the Bulge. While crossing a city street to find the first, she is struck and knocked unconscious by an automobile. The police find no identification on her, only a list of names. One recognizes the last name on her list, Smithfield "Smitty" Cobb, a reporter recently fired for alcoholism, and contacts Smitty. When Smitty sees the list, he realizes who she must be.
He goes to see her at the hospital, and finds her in a wheelchair, unable to walk. As the doctor can find no physical reason for the paralysis, he schedules an appointment with a psychiatrist. Smitty decides to treat her himself. He introduces himself as a friend of her husband David (though not as one of the men he saved), and wheels her into a private room. She explains her mission: to see if any of the men were worth David's sacrifice, making it perfectly clear that she has already made up her mind. After a nurse gives her a sedative, Smitty accuses her of wallowing in self-pity, then tries to get Janet to change her mind by describing each of the men. He is so vivid that Janet can see and talk to them.
The first man she interacts with is nightclub bouncer Joe Burton. He and his singer girlfriend Katie dream of building a house. Joe constructs a model of it from a deck of cards. Exasperated by their unrealistic aspirations, Janet blows the cards down.

Passage: Two pairs of friends, Matteo and Francesca & Shary and Diego, decide to spend the summer together in a beach house at the foot of Mount Circeo. Matteo,  a psychologist, is married to Francesca with whom he has a five-year-old girl, Elena. Diego and Shary have a less stable relationship, having a son together, David, who attends college in the United States. David comes to Italy for the first time in five years to spend time with his family and celebrate his birthday. Upon David's arrival, he and Matteo begin to develop feelings for each other. Only Leonard, Shary's brother, who has returned from his travels around the world to spend some time with the two pairs, seems to sense what is happening. The balance of Matteo's marriage begins to crack, and the growing tension seems to corrode the two families. While the rest of the household is out preparing for David's birthday party, Matteo goes to David's bedroom, and they have sex.  When Francesca returns, she has no front-door keys and enters the house through a patio door into David's room where she finds the two men having sex.  She runs out, and Matteo runs after her.  She dashes around a corner and into the street where she is hit and killed by a car. Later, Matteo, Shary, Diego, and David are having supper. Shary asks Matteo accusingly where he was at the time of the accident, and the movie ends as he begins to cry from guilt.

Passage: An elderly veteran visits the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial with his family. At a tombstone, he falls to his knees with emotion. The scene then shifts to the morning of June 6, 1944, as American soldiers land on Omaha Beach as part of the Normandy Invasion. They suffer heavy losses in assaulting fortified German defensive positions. Captain Miller of the 2nd Ranger Battalion leads a breakout from the beach. Elsewhere on the beach, a dead soldier lies face-down in the bloody surf; his pack is stenciled Ryan, S.
In Washington, D.C., at the U.S. War Department, General George Marshall learns that three of the four sons of the Ryan family were killed in action and that the fourth son, James, is with the 101st Airborne Division somewhere in Normandy. After reading Abraham Lincoln's Bixby letter aloud, Marshall orders Ryan brought home.
Three days after D-Day, Miller receives orders to find Ryan and bring him back. He chooses seven men from his company—T/Sgt. Horvath, Privates First Class Reiben and Caparzo, Privates Mellish and Jackson, T/4 medic Wade—plus T/5 Upham, an interpreter from headquarters. They move out to Neuville, where they meet a squad of the 101st engaged against the enemy. Caparzo is killed by a German sniper who is then killed by Jackson. They locate a Private James Ryan but he is not the right one. From passing soldiers, Miller learns that Ryan is defending an important bridge in Ramelle.
Near Ramelle, Miller decides to neutralize a German machine gun position at a derelict radar station, despite his men's misgivings. Wade is killed in the skirmish. At Upham's urging, Miller declines to execute a surviving German soldier, and sets him free. Losing confidence in Miller's leadership, Reiben declares his intention to desert, prompting a confrontation with Horvath. Miller defuses the standoff by disclosing his civilian career as a high school English teacher, about which his men had set up a betting pool; Reiben decides to stay.

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 1915 Berlin, the German high command is worried about ally Turkey. Recent British attacks on the vital Dardanelles shows signs of inside knowledge. Von Sturm, the head of German intelligence, is ordered to find out if Ali Bey, the Turkish commander of the region, is the traitor.
As his best agent has not been heard from in several weeks, von Sturm assigns Kruger the task. Shortly afterwards, Annemarie, known by the code name "Fräulein Doktor", returns after completing her mission. She also informs von Sturm that fellow spy Mata Hari has fallen in love and therefore can no longer be trusted. She recommends that an incriminating message be sent using a code that she knows has been broken by the Allies. In addition, she uncovers Kruger as a British double agent known as K-6.
When Kruger is arrested at his dentist contact's office, another patient, American medical student Douglas Beall, is also taken into custody, though he is later released. Just to be sure though, von Sturm orders Annemarie to make sure Beall is innocent. She arranges to be rescued from an unwanted "suitor" by Beall, who invites her to his hotel suite. During the course of the evening, he confesses he has fallen in love with her, now going by the name Helena Bohlen. Helena is attracted to him, but when she reads a coded message from von Sturm informing her that he has taken her advice regarding Mata Hari, she abruptly leaves.
Beall persists however. When Helena boards the train to Constantinople, he follows her on the spur of the moment and continues courting her, despite her half-hearted attempts to discourage him. Her assistant Karl watches with growing concern. As they near the Turkish border, she orders Karl to return to Germany so Beall can use his visa.

Passage: In 1942, Nazi Germany attempts to bring neutral Turkey into the war on its side by staging an assassination attempt on Franz von Papen, its own ambassador to the country. Much to the annoyance of Colonel Robinson, von Papen survives and the Russians that his agent provocateur was trying to frame have solid alibis, forcing him to turn to another scheme to inflame Turkey's traditional rivalry with Russia.
Meanwhile, American machinery salesman Joe Barton boards the Baghdad-Istanbul Express train at Aleppo and is attracted to another passenger, Ana Remzi. She is worried about being searched by customs agents once they reach the Turkish border; she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope containing some securities, all that remains of her inheritance. Joe obliges, but when he later examines the envelope, he finds maps of Turkey with writing on them.
When they stop in Ankara, he goes to her hotel to return her property, only to find she has been fatally wounded. He hides when someone else approaches the room. He watches unobserved as Soviet spy Nikolai Zaleshoff searches the dead woman's luggage. Then, Joe exits through the window. Leaving the scene, he is seen by Tamara Zaleshoff, Nikolai's sister and partner in espionage.
The Turkish police take Joe in for questioning, only it turns out that they are German agents. They take him to their leader, Colonel Robinson. Robinson wants the maps. Joe refuses to cooperate, and is taken away to be interrogated by Mailler. Before the Germans get very far, Joe is rescued by Nikolai.
When the Zaleshoffs reveal that they are Soviet agents, Joe agrees to fetch them the documents. Unfortunately, he finds his hotel room has been ransacked and the documents stolen.
Joe, it turns out, is also a spy (for the United States). When he reports to his boss, McNamara, he is assigned an assistant, Hassan.

Passage: In 1944, German intelligence strives to find the target of an upcoming raid by the reputed "B-99 bomber". To achieve this end, they interrogate a recently shot-down aircrew from a B-99 reconnaissance mission that was shot down over Italy. The aircrew is sent to Dulag Luft POW camp.
The German officers, commanded by Major von Behn use various methods to discover this information, some of them quite subtle. While interviewing Lieutenant Frank L. Williams, Jr. and Captain James Spencer, the two airmen at first resist any probing for information. Other members of the crew include Sergeant Alfred Mason.
Though no physical brutality is used, the Germans at one point stage a mock execution to scare a prisoner. Another prisoner is subjected to isolation to heighten his fear. Red Cross officers and a nurse use their positions to extract information from the prisoners.  Each airman eventually provides useful information because of their arrogance, fear or naivety. Some of what they say, which the enemy finds useful, seems innocuous but is used by the Germans as pieces to solve the larger puzzle.
In the end, the Germans are able to determine the target of the raid and the B-99 bombing mission is intercepted. The intended target is spared heavy damage with 21 B-99s shot down and the loss of 105 aircrew.
The U.S. intelligence officer  (Lloyd Nolan) in his briefing to the surviving members of the raid, stresses not to talk under any circumstances, concerned that the danger of talking too much, even innocuous conversation can help the enemy. He also states not to let down one's guard, that everything in a prison camp is suspect, and to not try to outwit the enemy.

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: Seattle has three major men's professional sports teams: the National Football League (NFL)'s Seattle Seahawks, Major League Baseball (MLB)'s Seattle Mariners, and Major League Soccer (MLS)'s Seattle Sounders FC. Other professional sports teams include the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA)'s Seattle Storm, who won the WNBA championship on three occasions in 2004 and 2010, and 2018; and the Seattle Reign of the National Women's Soccer League.The Seattle Seahawks entered the National Football League in 1976 as an expansion team and have advanced to the Super Bowl three times: 2005, 2013 and 2014. The team played in the Kingdome until it was imploded in 2000 and moved into Qwest Field (now CenturyLink Field) at the same site in 2003. The Seahawks lost Super Bowl XL in 2005 to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Detroit, but won Super Bowl XLVIII in 2013 by defeating the Denver Broncos 43–8 at MetLife Stadium. The team advanced to the Super Bowl the following year, but lost to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX on a last-minute play. Seahawks fans have set stadium noise records on several occasions and are collectively known as the "12th Man".Seattle Sounders FC has played in Major League Soccer since 2009, sharing CenturyLink Field with the Seahawks, as a continuation of earlier teams in the lower divisions of American soccer. The team set various attendance records in its first few seasons, averaging over 43,000 per match and placing themselves among the top 30 teams internationally. The Sounders have won the MLS Supporters' Shield in 2014 and the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup on four occasions: 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2014. The Sounders won their first MLS Cup after defeating Toronto FC 5–4 in a penalty shootout, in MLS Cup 2016; the team would go on to finish as runners-up to Toronto FC in the following cup. CenturyLink Field hosted the 2009 MLS Cup, played between Real Salt Lake and the Los Angeles Galaxy in front of 46,011 spectators.Seattle also has a Major League Rugby team, the Seattle Seawolves, who play at Starfire Sports in Tukwila, a small stadium that is also used by the Sounders for their U.S. Open Cup matches. The team began play in 2018 and won the league's inaugural championship. Seattle will also host a new XFL franchise that will begin play in 2020 at CenturyLink Field.Seattle's professional sports history began at the start of the 20th century with the PCHA's Seattle Metropolitans, which in 1917 became the first American hockey team to win the Stanley Cup.

Passage: Seattle was awarded a Major League Baseball franchise, the Seattle Pilots, in 1969. The team played at Sick's Stadium in Mount Baker for one season before relocating to Milwaukee and becoming the Milwaukee Brewers. The city, county, and state governments sued the league and was offered a second expansion team, the Seattle Mariners, who began play at the Kingdome in 1977. The Mariners struggled in the stadium and moved to a purpose-built baseball stadium, T-Mobile Park (formerly Safeco Field), in 1999. The Mariners have never reached a World Series and only appeared in the MLB playoffs four times, all between 1995 and 2001, despite having Hall of Fame players and candidates like Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro, and Alex Rodriguez. The team tied the all-time single regular season wins record in 2001 with 116 wins. Since 2001, the Mariners have failed to qualify for the playoffs—the longest active postseason drought in North American sports, at 17 seasons.
From 1967 to 2008 Seattle was also home to a National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise: the Seattle SuperSonics, who were the 1978–79 NBA champions. The SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City and became the Oklahoma City Thunder for the 2008–09 season.The Major League Baseball All-Star Game was held in Seattle twice, first at the Kingdome in 1979 and again at Safeco Field in 2001. The NBA All-Star Game was also held in Seattle twice: the first in 1974 at the Seattle Center Coliseum and the second in 1987 at the Kingdome.Seattle also boasts two collegiate sports teams based at the University of Washington and Seattle University, both competing in NCAA Division I for various sports. The University of Washington's athletic program, nicknamed the Huskies, competes in the Pac-12 Conference, and Seattle University's athletic program, nicknamed the Redhawks, mostly competes in the Western Athletic Conference. The Huskies teams use several facilities, including the 70,000-seat Husky Stadium for football and the Hec Edmundson Pavilion for basketball and volleyball. The two schools have basketball and soccer teams that compete against each other in non-conference games and have formed a local rivalry due to their sporting success.The Seattle Thunderbirds hockey team plays in the Canadian major-junior Western Hockey League and are based in the Seattle suburb of Kent. Seattle successfully applied for a new expansion team with the National Hockey League, which will make its first appearance in 2021. Seattle plans to renovate KeyArena to use for the possible NHL team. On March 1, 2018, a ticket drive began to gauge interests in season ticket deposits. Oak View reported that their initial goal of 10,000 deposits was surpassed in 12 minutes, and that they received 25,000 deposits in 75 minutes.

Passage: Major League Baseball's San Francisco Giants have played in San Francisco since moving from New York in 1958. The Giants play at Oracle Park, which opened in 2000. The Giants won World Series titles in 2010, 2012, and in 2014. The Giants have boasted such stars as Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Barry Bonds. In 2012, San Francisco was ranked No. 1 in a study that examined which U.S. metro areas have produced the most Major Leaguers since 1920.The San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League (NFL) were the longest-tenured major professional sports franchise in the city until moving in 2013. The team began play in 1946 as an All-America Football Conference (AAFC) league charter member, moved to the NFL in 1950 and into Candlestick Park in 1971. The team began playing its home games at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara in 2014, closer to the city of San Jose. The 49ers won five Super Bowl titles in the 1980s and 1990s.
The San Francisco Warriors played in the NBA from 1962–1971, before being renamed the Golden State Warriors prior to the 1971–1972 season in an attempt to present the team as a representation of the whole state of California. The Warrior's stadium, Oracle Arena, is currently located in Oakland. They have won 6 championships, including three of the last four.
At the collegiate level, the San Francisco Dons compete in NCAA Division I. Bill Russell led the Don's basketball team to NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956. There is also the San Francisco State Gators, who compete in NCAA Division II. Oracle Park hosted the annual Fight Hunger Bowl college football game from 2002 through 2013 before it moved to Santa Clara.
The Bay to Breakers footrace, held annually since 1912, is best known for colorful costumes and a celebratory community spirit. The San Francisco Marathon attracts more than 21,000 participants. The Escape from Alcatraz triathlon has, since 1980, attracted 2,000 top professional and amateur triathletes for its annual race. The Olympic Club, founded in 1860, is the oldest athletic club in the United States. Its private golf course has hosted the U.S. Open on five occasions. San Francisco hosted the 2013 America's Cup yacht racing competition.With an ideal climate for outdoor activities, San Francisco has ample resources and opportunities for amateur and participatory sports and recreation. There are more than 200 miles (320 km) of bicycle paths, lanes and bike routes in the city.
San Francisco residents have often ranked among the fittest in the country. Golden Gate Park has miles of paved and unpaved running trails as well as a golf course and disc golf course.
Boating, sailing, windsurfing and kitesurfing are among the popular activities on San Francisco Bay, and the city maintains a yacht harbor in the Marina District.

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: Following the death of rancher John Dodge, foreman Gene Autry is left the responsibility of taking care of Rancho Grande ranch and Dodge's three spoiled grandchildren raised in the east. Gene is also responsible for completing a major project started by Dodge—the construction of an irrigation system that would bring valuable water to the faithful Rancho Grande employees in the southern part of the valley. Dodge mortgaged his ranch in order to finance the project.
When Dodge's grandchildren, Tom, Kay, and Patsy, arrive from the east, they are unimpressed with life on the ranch. Tom and Kay are madcap college types who think ranchlife is boring and long to return to the big city. They resent Gene's authority and dismiss his talk of developing a work ethic and the importance of the irrigation project. Meanwhile, crooked lawyer Emory Benson is planning to seize the mortgage to Rancho Grande. After meeting Tom and Kay, he decides to take advantage of their discontent in order to slow the irrigation project and prevent the bank from renewing the mortgage.
Gradually, Gene is able to win Kay over to his way of thinking, but Tom falls in with a group of partying tenderfoots from the east. He invites them to stay at Rancho Grande, where they get in everyone's way. Gene and his sidekick Frog Millhouse finally succeed in scaring the dudes off the ranch. Angered by Gene's actions, Tom and Kay decide to leave. When a rockslide at the irrigation project site injures Jose, a faithful Rancho Grande employee, Tom and Kay come to their senses and pledge to help complete the project on time.

Passage: Tired of traveling around the country performing their music, singing cowboy Gene Autry and his Texas Troubadors decide to purchase a cattle ranch and settle down. When they arrive at the ranch purchased for them by Frog Millhouse, they cannot believe that the herd consists of milkcows rather than the cattle they had anticipated.
Soon they find themselves in the middle of a dairy war in which various farmers' trucks are being hijacked and destroyed in an attempt to drive them out of business. The town veterinarian, Dr. Rodney Blair, suggests that the Hall Trucking Company is behind the raids and proposes the establishment of a protective association. No one suspects that Blair and deputy sheriff Dave Haines are in fact the real masterminds behind the sabotage. When Gene vetoes Blair's idea of a protective association, the doctor directs his men to attack Gene's ranch, sending a secret code over the radio station owned by Haines's unsuspecting sister Carol.
During the raid, Gene captures Clanton, one of Blair's men, and turns him over to Sheriff George Glenn. Soon after, Blair arrives at the jail, kills the sheriff, and frees his henchman. Suspecting that Blair and Haines are involved in the raids, Gene accepts decides to run for sheriff against Haines, and he wins. Gene then convinces the ranchers to contract with the Hall Trucking Company. When he discovers Blair's secret radio messages, he tricks Dr. Blair and his men into an ambush in which the milk trucks are overturned, and the hijackers are caught. Gene and his men emerge victorious in the dairy war.

Passage: Cowboy drifter Jim Garry is summoned by his friend, smooth-talking Tate Riling. Garry rides into an Indian reservation and finds himself in the middle of a conflict between a cattle owner and some homesteaders. He meets cattle owner John Lufton, and eventually his daughters Amy and Carol. The Luftons suspect that Garry is on Riling's side and are initially hostile, especially Amy. Garry readily admits that he is going to work for his friend.
Riling tells Garry that he and Indian agent Jake Pindalest have devised an elaborate scheme to force Lufton into selling his herd cheaply. Pindalest has gotten the government to order Lufton to remove his cattle from the reservation in a week. Meanwhile, Riling has organized the homesteaders into blocking the move, conning them into believing that he is working in their best interests. With no other option, Lufton would have to sell his herd at bargain prices or lose everything. Lufton would never sell to Riling, but he would to a stranger like Garry. Pindalest would then see that the government buys the herd at an inflated price. Garry would get $10,000 for his part in the swindle.
Lufton manages to outsmart Riling and move his herd unimpeded, but Riling and his men stampede and scatter the cattle back onto the reservation. It would take several days to gather the herd, more time than Lufton has before the deadline. Garry becomes disgusted when a man is killed in the stampede, and he switches sides. Amy still does not trust him. She suspects Garry of betraying the contents of a letter to Riling, unaware that Carol is enamored with Riling and is the one passing information to him. Eventually, Amy comes to trust (and fall in love with) Garry, especially after he defends her father from two of Riling's men.

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: Oklahoma was the 21st-largest recipient of medical funding from the federal government in 2005, with health-related federal expenditures in the state totaling $75,801,364; immunizations, bioterrorism preparedness, and health education were the top three most funded medical items. Instances of major diseases are near the national average in Oklahoma, and the state ranks at or slightly above the rest of the country in percentage of people with asthma, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension.In 2000, Oklahoma ranked 45th in physicians per capita and slightly below the national average in nurses per capita, but was slightly over the national average in hospital beds per 100,000 people and above the national average in net growth of health services over a 12-year period. One of the worst states for percentage of insured people, nearly 25 percent of Oklahomans between the age of 18 and 64 did not have health insurance in 2005, the fifth-highest rate in the nation.Oklahomans are in the upper half of Americans in terms of obesity prevalence, and the state is the 5th most obese in the nation, with 30.3 percent of its population at or near obesity. Oklahoma ranked last among the 50 states in a 2007 study by the Commonwealth Fund on health care performance.The OU Medical Center, Oklahoma's largest collection of hospitals, is the only hospital in the state designated a Level I trauma center by the American College of Surgeons. OU Medical Center is on the grounds of the Oklahoma Health Center in Oklahoma City, the state's largest concentration of medical research facilities.The Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Southwestern Regional Medical Center in Tulsa is one of four such regional facilities nationwide, offering cancer treatment to the entire southwestern United States, and is one of the largest cancer treatment hospitals in the country. The largest osteopathic teaching facility in the nation, Oklahoma State University Medical Center at Tulsa, also rates as one of the largest facilities in the field of neuroscience.
On June 26, 2018, Oklahoma made marijuana legal for medical purposes. This was a milestone for a state in the Bible Belt.

Passage: In mid-2011, Oklahoma had a civilian labor force of 1.7 million and non-farm employment fluctuated around 1.5 million. The government sector provides the most jobs, with 339,300 in 2011, followed by the transportation and utilities sector, providing 279,500 jobs, and the sectors of education, business, and manufacturing, providing 207,800, 177,400, and 132,700 jobs, respectively. Among the state's largest industries, the aerospace sector generates $11 billion annually.Tulsa is home to the largest airline maintenance base in the world, which serves as the global maintenance and engineering headquarters for American Airlines. In total, aerospace accounts for more than 10 percent of Oklahoma's industrial output, and it is one of the top 10 states in aerospace engine manufacturing. Because of its position in the center of the United States, Oklahoma is also among the top states for logistic centers, and a major contributor to weather-related research.The state is the top manufacturer of tires in North America and contains one of the fastest-growing biotechnology industries in the nation. In 2005, international exports from Oklahoma's manufacturing industry totaled $4.3 billion, accounting for 3.6 percent of its economic impact. Tire manufacturing, meat processing, oil and gas equipment manufacturing, and air conditioner manufacturing are the state's largest manufacturing industries.

Passage: The Legislature of Oklahoma consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives. As the lawmaking branch of the state government, it is responsible for raising and distributing the money necessary to run the government. The Senate has 48 members serving four-year terms, while the House has 101 members with two-year terms. The state has a term limit for its legislature that restricts any one person to twelve cumulative years service between both legislative branches.Oklahoma's judicial branch consists of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, and 77 District Courts that each serve one county. The Oklahoma judiciary also contains two independent courts: a Court of Impeachment and the Oklahoma Court on the Judiciary. Oklahoma has two courts of last resort: the state Supreme Court hears civil cases, and the state Court of Criminal Appeals hears criminal cases (this split system exists only in Oklahoma and neighboring Texas). Judges of those two courts, as well as the Court of Civil Appeals are appointed by the Governor upon the recommendation of the state Judicial Nominating Commission, and are subject to a non-partisan retention vote on a six-year rotating schedule.
The executive branch consists of the Governor, their staff, and other elected officials. The principal head of government, the Governor is the chief executive of the Oklahoma executive branch, serving as the ex officio Commander-in-chief of the Oklahoma National Guard when not called into Federal use and reserving the power to veto bills passed through the Legislature. The responsibilities of the Executive branch include submitting the budget, ensuring state laws are enforced, and ensuring peace within the state is preserved.

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: Percy Caldwell is a teenage boy who lives in Pine Bluffs, California. He is in love with Madison, his high school's most popular cheerleader, but his best friend Leonard doesn't think he stands a chance. One day, after Percy rescues Madison from two local bullies, brothers named Cletis and Devlin, the brothers knock his bicycle off the road with their truck, and Percy ends up crashing in the woods, falling unconscious.
When Percy wakes up, he sees a seven-foot-tall Bigfoot standing over him. Percy is initially scared, but the creature seems friendly and interacts with him. Then, Percy rushes home where he tells his parents but they do not believe him.
The next day, Madison thanks Percy for saving her from the bullies; giving him a kiss and declaring him her boyfriend. After school, Percy goes to see the Sasquatch in the woods and they share a picnic. Cletis and Devlin, who are going bear hunting, hear the Sasquatch burp from a distance and mistake him for a Grizzly bear.Percy hears the hunters and tells the Sasquatch to flee. When the brothers find Percy they threaten him, and Bigfoot comes to Percy's rescue; throwing the brothers down a hill. After that, the brothers start planning to catch the creature to sell for big money.
The next morning Percy goes back into the woods for another picnic with Bigfoot. When he gets home, Madison arrives. While they are watching King Kong, Percy tells Madison about his encounters with the Sasquatch but she doesn't believe him and begins to have doubts about him. Meanwhile, Cletis and Devlin are building a cage for the Sasquatch in their barn.
The following day, Percy tells Madison and Leonard to follow him to go see the Sasquatch, but Madison then decides that their relationship is over and she leaves. Leonard, however, agrees to go with him.

Passage: In Seattle, strait-laced Matt Leland falls in love with Casey Roberts, the new girl at their high school who's from Chicago. They begin a sexual relationship. His father disapproves of this and her parents try to stop them from continuing to see each other. She deliberately sets off the fire alarm at school, knowing that there is no fire there, and is subsequently suspended. She has an argument with her parents when they tell her they are sending her to a boarding school. She takes an overdose and her parents subsequently arrange to have her committed. Matt helps Casey escape from an acute psychiatric ward, and as they run away they both deal with her borderline personality disorder.
Casey is eccentric in nature. Her impulsiveness and extreme risk-taking attitude and behavior is attributed to her illness, in which she experiences severe highs and lows of emotion. Her frequent intense feelings, of passion towards Matt and of fear and destructiveness, dominate her persona. Throughout the relationship, Matt selflessly puts her needs before his. The severity of this increases as her mental state worsens.

Passage: An older couple, Frank and Mary Sylvester, are cooking food over a campfire. Unbeknownst to them, they are being watched by a mysterious figure in the shadows. While Mary is taking a walk in the woods, she hears her husband scream and returns to the campsite to find her husband's decapitated corpse. She is then killed by the killer wielding her husband's axe.
Several weeks later, three teenaged couples are hiking in the same remote forest high in the Colorado Rockies to enjoy the nature and to spend time together. As they progress deeper into the wilderness, it becomes clear that the killer is stalking them. During their first night in the woods, Gail hears a noise and sends her boyfriend Greg to check out the disturbance. While isolated, they are both murdered by the killer.
The next day, their friends Nancy, Bobbie, Skip, and Joel find the couple's gear missing and assume that they have turned back and gone home. Skip and Joel decide to head for the infamous Suicide Peak to do some rock climbing while the girls suntan. Meanwhile, forest rangers Lester Tile and Mark O'Brien get a phone call about the missing Sylvester couple, and Mark heads into the forest to investigate. Before leaving, Lester tells Mark a story about a Gypsy boy he once saw during a forest fire years ago. The boy was covered in burns, horribly disfigured, and left for dead.

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 Bertin portrait has been hugely influential. At first it served as a model for depictions of energetic and intellectual 19th-century men, and later as a more universal type. Several 1890s works closely echo its form and motifs. Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant's monochrome and severe 1896 Portrait of Alfred Chauchard is heavily indebted, while Léon Bonnat's stern 1892 portrait of the aging Ernest Renan has been described as a "direct citation" of Ingres' portrait.
Its influence can be seen in the dismissive stare and overwhelming physical presence of the sitter in Pablo Picasso's 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Picasso admired Ingres and referred to him throughout his career. His invoking of Bertin can be read as a humorous reference to, according to Robert Rosenblum, "Stein's ponderous bulk and sexual preference". Stein does not possess Bertin's ironic stare, but is similarly dressed in black, and leans forward in an imposing manner, the painting emphasising her "massive, monumental presence". In 1907 the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton depicted Stein, in response to Picasso, making an even more direct reference to Ingres' portrait, prompting Édouard Vuillard to exclaim, "That's Madame Bertin!"The influence continued through the 20th century. Gerald Kelly recalled Bertin when painting his restless and confined series of portraits of Ralph Vaughan Williams between 1952 and 1961. In 1975 Marcel Broodthaers produced a series of nine black and white photographs on board based on Ingres' portraits of Bertin and Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière.

Passage: Portrait of Monsieur Bertin is an 1832 oil on canvas painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It depicts Louis-François Bertin (1766–1841), the French writer, art collector and director of the pro-royalist Journal des débats. Ingres completed the portrait during his first period of success; having achieved acclaim as a history painter, he accepted portrait commissions with reluctance, regarding them as a distraction from more important work. Bertin was a friend and a politically active member of the French upper-middle class. Ingres presents him as a personification of the commercially minded leaders of the liberal reign of Louis Philippe I. He is physically imposing and self-assured, but his real-life personality shines through – warm, wry and engaging to those who had earned his trust.
The painting had a prolonged genesis. Ingres agonised over the pose and made several preparatory sketches. The final work faithfully captures the sitter's character, conveying both a restless energy and imposing bulk. It is an unflinchingly realistic depiction of ageing and emphasises the furrowed skin and thinning hair of an overweight man who yet maintains his resolve and determination. He sits in three-quarter profile against a brown ground lit from the right, his fingers are pronounced and highly detailed, while the polish of his chair reflects light from an unseen window.
Ingres' portrait of Bertin was a critical and popular success, but the sitter was a private person. Although his family worried about caricature and disapproved, it became widely known and sealed the artist's reputation. It was praised at the Paris Salon of 1833, and has been influential to both academic painters such as Léon Bonnat and later modernists including Pablo Picasso and Félix Vallotton. Today art critics regard it as Ingres' finest male portrait. It has been on permanent display at the Musée du Louvre since 1897.

Passage: Albrecht the Elder was 62 or 63  when his panel was painted early in 1490. Barbara's portrait may have been completed soon after, when she would have been around 39. Their son was around 18 and had just completed his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, and would soon leave for Nuremberg to travel as a journeyman painter. The father panel was painted first; for aesthetic reasons Dürer may have waited a year or two until his mother looked older.The sitters are presented in three-quarter view before flat, nondescript lacquer-like green backgrounds, which although lushly coloured, are thinly layered. Each has a white ground and light red imprimatura with lead content. The sitter's form and pose echo and in many ways counterbalance each other. Brand Philip draws attention to the similarities of the panels' linear construction, especially the manner in which the folds and lines of their clothing form triangular shapes. The train of Barbara's headdress across her chest corresponds with the opening of Albrecht's fur-lined coat. It was more usual in pendant portraits of this type for the male to be on the left-hand side; the positioning here may be an indication that Dürer originally intended his father's panel to stand alone, given that Barbara's was painted some time later.Albrecht the Elder's panel is regarded as the superior of the two works. This may in part be attributed to differing contemporary treatments of male and female portraits; men were allowed more individuality, while female portraits were bound by stereotypes and were not as daring, for example showing evidence of ageing. In either case, the father painting is far more closely detailed, especially in the lining of clothing, which is summary in Barbara's panel, compared to the long seam of her husband's gown. This contrast in detail can also be seen in the treatment of the rosaries, which are given prominence and a glowing red colour in his panel, but are small and relegated in hers.Albrecht the Elder's panel is usually, but not always, thought to be the first of the two to be executed and, if so, is the earliest extant example of his son's painting. In contrast, a number of art historians have noted that his mother's portrait contains bland passages, especially around the eyes and may be a near-contemporary copy of a lost original. Lotte Brand Philip believes the clumsiness in the mother panel indicated that Dürer painted it first, as a youthful attempt at portraiture, and that Albrecht the Elder might have later "commissioned" his own portrait to pair with Barbara's. Recent technical examination of the two panels confirms that Barbara's portrait was painted later than her husband's.

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: Author Robert Rodriguez writes that while Lennon, Harrison and Starr embraced the creative freedom afforded by McCartney's band-within-a-band idea, they "went along with the concept with varying degrees of enthusiasm". According to Barry Miles, Lennon resented McCartney's direction of the band as well as how, aside from "Strawberry Fields Forever", he himself was now supplying "songs to order" rather than "writing from the heart" as he had on Revolver. Everett describes Starr as having been "largely bored" during the sessions, with the drummer later lamenting: "The biggest memory I have of Sgt. Pepper ... is I learned to play chess". Speaking in 2000, Harrison said he had little interest in McCartney's concept of a fictitious group and that, after his experiences in India, "my heart was still out there … I was losing interest in being 'fab' at that point." Harrison added that, having enjoyed recording Rubber Soul and Revolver, he disliked how the group's approach on Sgt. Pepper became "an assembly process" whereby, "A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren't allowed to play as a band as much."After finishing Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles took an acetate disc of the album to the American singer Cass Elliot's flat off King's Road in Chelsea, where at six in the morning they played it at full volume with speakers set in open window frames. The group's friend and former press agent, Derek Taylor, remembered that residents of the neighbourhood opened their windows and listened without complaint to what they understood to be unreleased Beatles music.

Passage: Harrison wrote his first song, "Don't Bother Me", while sick in a hotel bed in Bournemouth during August 1963, as "an exercise to see if I could write a song", as he remembered. His songwriting ability improved throughout the Beatles' career, but his material did not earn full respect from Lennon, McCartney and producer George Martin until near the group's break-up. In 1969, McCartney told Lennon: "Until this year, our songs have been better than George's. Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours". Harrison often had difficulty getting the band to record his songs. Most Beatles albums from 1965 onwards contain at least two Harrison compositions; three of his songs appear on Revolver, "the album on which Harrison came of age as a songwriter", according to Inglis.
Harrison wrote the chord progression of "Don't Bother Me" almost exclusively in the Dorian mode, demonstrating an interest in exotic tones that eventually culminated in his embrace of Indian music. The latter proved a strong influence on his songwriting and contributed to his innovation within the Beatles. According to Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone, "Harrison's openness to new sounds and textures cleared new paths for his rock and roll compositions. His use of dissonance on ... 'Taxman' and 'I Want to Tell You' was revolutionary in popular music – and perhaps more originally creative than the avant-garde mannerisms that Lennon and McCartney borrowed from the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky ..."Of the 1967 Harrison song "Within You Without You", author Gerry Farrell said that Harrison had created a "new form", calling the composition "a quintessential fusion of pop and Indian music". Lennon called the song one of Harrison's best: "His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent, he brought that sound together." In his next fully Indian-styled song, "The Inner Light", Harrison embraced the Karnatak discipline of Indian music, rather than the Hindustani style he had used in "Love You To" and "Within You Without You". Writing in 1997, Farrell commented: "It is a mark of Harrison's sincere involvement with Indian music that, nearly thirty years on, the Beatles' 'Indian' songs remain the most imaginative and successful examples of this type of fusion – for example, 'Blue Jay Way' and 'The Inner Light'."Beatles biographer Bob Spitz described "Something" as a masterpiece, and "an intensely stirring romantic ballad that would challenge 'Yesterday' and 'Michelle' as one of the most recognizable songs they ever produced". Inglis considered Abbey Road a turning point in Harrison's development as a songwriter and musician. He described Harrison's two contributions to the LP, "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something", as "exquisite", declaring them equal to any previous Beatles songs.

Passage: In the interim came The Beatles, a double LP commonly known as the White Album for its virtually featureless cover. Creative inspiration for the album came from a new direction: without Epstein's guiding presence, the group had briefly turned to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their guru. At his ashram in Rishikesh, India, a "Guide Course" scheduled for three months marked one of their most prolific periods, yielding numerous songs including a majority of the 30 included on the album. However, Starr left after only ten days, likening it to Butlins, and McCartney eventually grew bored and departed a month later. For Lennon and Harrison, creativity turned to questioning when an electronics technician known as Magic Alex suggested that the Maharishi was attempting to manipulate them. When he alleged that the Maharishi had made sexual advances to women attendees, a persuaded Lennon left abruptly just two months into the course, bringing an unconvinced Harrison and the remainder of the group's entourage with him. In anger, Lennon wrote a scathing song titled "Maharishi", renamed "Sexy Sadie" to avoid potential legal issues. McCartney said, "We made a mistake. We thought there was more to him than there was."During recording sessions for the White Album, which stretched from late May to mid-October 1968, relations between the Beatles grew openly divisive. Starr quit for two weeks, and McCartney took over the drum kit for "Back in the U.S.S.R." (on which Harrison and Lennon drummed as well) and "Dear Prudence". Lennon had lost interest in collaborating with McCartney, whose contribution "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" he scorned as "granny music shit". Tensions were further aggravated by Lennon's romantic preoccupation with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, whom he insisted on bringing to the sessions despite the group's well-established understanding that girlfriends were not allowed in the studio. Describing the double album, Lennon later said: "Every track is an individual track; there isn't any Beatle music on it. [It's] John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band." McCartney has recalled that the album "wasn't a pleasant one to make". Both he and Lennon identified the sessions as the start of the band's break-up.Issued in November, the White Album was the band's first Apple Records album release, although EMI continued to own their recordings. The new label was a subsidiary of Apple Corps, which Epstein had formed as part of his plan to create a tax-effective business structure. The record attracted more than 2 million advance orders, selling nearly 4 million copies in the US in little over a month, and its tracks dominated the playlists of American radio stations. Despite its popularity, it did not receive flattering reviews at the time. According to Gould:.

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.