TASK DEFINITION: This task involves creating answers to complex questions, from a given passage. Answering these questions, typically involve understanding multiple sentences. Make sure that your answer has the same type as the "answer type" mentioned in input. The provided "answer type" can be of any of the following types: "span", "date", "number". A "span" answer is a continuous phrase taken directly from the passage or question. You can directly copy-paste the text from the passage or the question for span type answers. If you find multiple spans, please add them all as a comma separated list. Please restrict each span to five words. A "number" type answer can include a digit specifying an actual value. For "date" type answers, use DD MM YYYY format e.g. 11 Jan 1992. If full date is not available in the passage you can write partial date such as 1992 or Jan 1992. If you find multiple spans, please add them all as a comma separated list. Please restrict each span to five words.
PROBLEM: Passage: The squadron of Vasco da Gama left Portugal in 1497, rounded the Cape and continued along the coast of East Africa, where a local pilot was brought on board who guided them across the Indian Ocean, reaching Calicut in western India in May 1498. The second voyage to India was dispatched in 1500 under Pedro Álvares Cabral. While following the same south-westerly route as Gama across the Atlantic Ocean, Cabral made landfall on the Brazilian coast. This was probably an accidental discovery, but it has been speculated that the Portuguese secretly knew of Brazil's existence and that it lay on their side of the Tordesillas line. Cabral recommended to the Portuguese King that the land be settled, and two follow up voyages were sent in 1501 and 1503. The land was found to be abundant in pau-brasil, or brazilwood, from which it later inherited its name, but the failure to find gold or silver meant that for the time being Portuguese efforts were concentrated on India. On 8 July 1497 the fleet, consisting of four ships and a crew of 170 men, left Lisbon The travel led by Vasco da Gama to Calicut was the starting point for deployment of Portuguese in the African east coast and in the Indian Ocean. The first contact occurred on 20 May 1498. After some conflict, he got an ambiguous letter for trade with the Zamorin of Calicut, leaving there some men to establish a trading post. Since then explorations lost the private nature, taking place under the exclusive of the Portuguese Crown. Shortly after, the Casa da Índia was established in Lisbon to administer the royal monopoly of navigation and trade. 
Question: How many years passed between the first and fourth voyage to India? 
Answer type: Number 

SOLUTION: 6.

PROBLEM: Passage: In October 1998, Macromedia disclosed the Flash Version 3 Specification on its website. It did this in response to many new and often semi-open formats competing with SWF, such as Xara's Flare and Sharp's Extended Vector Animation formats. Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF. In February 1999, MorphInk 99 was introduced, the first third-party program to create SWF files. Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5. Macromedia made the Flash Files specifications for versions 6 and later available only under a non-disclosure agreement, but they are widely available from various sites. In April 2006, the Flash SWF file format specification was released with details on the then newest version format . Although still lacking specific information on the incorporated video compression formats , this new documentation covered all the new features offered in Flash v8 including new ActionScript commands, expressive filter controls, and so on. The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license does not allow the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files. The Flash 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions. In June 2009, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project , which made the SWF specification available without restrictions. Previously, developers could not use the specification for making SWF-compatible players, but only for making SWF-exporting authoring software. The specification still omits information on codecs such as Sorenson Spark, however. 
Question: How many other companies was it competing with for semi-open formats? 
Answer type: Number 

SOLUTION: 2.

PROBLEM: Passage: German has 13,444 speakers representing about 0.4% of the states population, and Vietnamese is spoken by 11,330 people, or about 0.4% of the population, many of whom live in the Asia District, Oklahoma City of Oklahoma City. Other languages include French with 8,258 speakers (0.3%), Chinese Americans with 6,413 (0.2%), Korean with 3,948 (0.1%), Arabic with 3,265 (0.1%), other Asian languages with 3,134 (0.1%), Tagalog language with 2,888 (0.1%), Japanese with 2,546 (0.1%), and African languages with 2,546 (0.1%). In addition to Cherokee, more than 25 Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken in Oklahoma, second only to California (though, it should be noted only Cherokee exhibits language vitality at present). 
Question: How many more people speak German compared to Korean, Tagalog, and Arabic combined? 
Answer type: Number 

SOLUTION:
3343.