TASK DEFINITION: This task is about writing a correct answer for the reading comprehension task. Based on the information provided in a given passage, you should identify the shortest continuous text span from the passage that serves as an answer to the given question. Avoid answers that are incorrect or provides incomplete justification for the question.
PROBLEM: Passage: The foundation of Northwestern University is traceable to a meeting on May 31, 1850 of nine prominent Chicago businessmen, Methodist leaders and attorneys who had formed the idea of establishing a university to serve what had once been known as the Northwest Territory. On January 28, 1851, the Illinois General Assembly granted a charter to the Trustees of the North-Western University, making it the first chartered university in Illinois. The school's nine founders, all of whom were Methodists (three of them ministers), knelt in prayer and worship before launching their first organizational meeting. Although they affiliated the university with the Methodist Episcopal Church, they were committed to non-sectarian admissions, believing that Northwestern should serve all people in the newly developing territory. Question: How many founders did Northwestern University have?

SOLUTION: nine

PROBLEM: Passage: Samurai were many of the early exchange students, not directly because they were samurai, but because many samurai were literate and well-educated scholars. Some of these exchange students started private schools for higher educations, while many samurai took pens instead of guns and became reporters and writers, setting up newspaper companies, and others entered governmental service. Some samurai became businessmen. For example, Iwasaki Yatarō, who was the great-grandson of a samurai, established Mitsubishi. Question: What kind of schools did samurai start?

SOLUTION: private schools for higher educations

PROBLEM: Passage: In the first volume of his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer wrote his "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real". He defined the ideal as being mental pictures that constitute subjective knowledge. The ideal, for him, is what can be attributed to our own minds. The images in our head are what comprise the ideal. Schopenhauer emphasized that we are restricted to our own consciousness. The world that appears is only a representation or mental picture of objects. We directly and immediately know only representations. All objects that are external to the mind are known indirectly through the mediation of our mind. He offered a history of the concept of the "ideal" as "ideational" or "existing in the mind as an image". Question: Who wrote Parerga and Paralipomena?

SOLUTION:
Schopenhauer