TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you will be shown an extract from a movie plot. You need to read the extract and create questions that can be answered from the extract. The questions should be well-formed and grammatically correct. The questions should be completely answerable from the given passage and should not require any external knowledge. Subjective questions are not allowed. Create questions that result in factoid answers. A simple rule of thumb to decide whether a question is factoid or not is to see if two different people with average reading/comprehension skills would come up with the same answer after reading the passage.
PROBLEM: Christopher (Billy Drago), a Victorian era American journalist, is traveling through Japan looking for Komomo (ItÃ´), a lost girlfriend whom he had promised to rescue from prostitution and bring to America. Landing on an island populated solely by whores and their masters, he is solicited by a syphilitic tout (Yamada). He claims no knowledge of Komomo, but Christopher has to spend the night, requesting the company of a girl (Youki Kudoh) lurking back in the shadows, who joins him in his room.Disfigured and disturbed, the girl claims a closer connection with the dead than the living. She tells him that Komomo was there, but hung herself after her love never came for her. Distraught, Christopher seeks solace in sake. Falling asleep, he requests a bedtime story. The girl recounts her past â her mother, a midwife, was forced to sell her to a brothel after her father died, and eventually she wound up on the island. Komomo was the most popular girl there, making the others jealous. When the Madam's jade ring was stolen, Komomo was tortured to confess. After suffering hideously â underarms burned, needles driven under fingernails and into gums â she hung herself in torment and tired of waiting for her love.Christopher refuses to believe the girl's story, and he pleads for the whole truth. The girl starts again, in the second telling, her family is no longer happy nor loving; her father was an alcoholic, her mother an abortionist. She was taken in by a Buddhist priest, who, presumably, molested her and inspired an obsession with hell. Her father never died of lung disease â she beat him to death for raping her. Again she tells of being sold into prostitution, but gives a new version of the dark fate of Christopher's beloved Komomo. Despite the kindness of Komomo, who befriended her, the disfigured girl stole the jade ring and planted Komomo's hairpin to frame her â and after Komomo was tortured, killed her. She explains to Christopher that she intended to save Komomo from hell: as Komomo would be doomed for having such an evil friend, only through betrayal could she sever the friendship and ensure Komomo a deservedly beautiful afterlife.Christopher, losing control, is desperately convinced something has been left out. He begs for the whole truth. The woman then reveals a horrifying secret: a tiny second head in the center of a hand hidden beneath her hair â her "Little Sis", a parasitic twin. Her mother and father had been brother and sister, "Little Sis" was the fruit of their incest. It was "Little Sis" who commanded her to kill her father, and to steal the ring. As the hand begins to talk like Komomo in a high-pitched voice, Christopher is overcome by madness and threatens to shoot her and send her to hell. She informs him that wherever he goes, he will be in hell - a flashback implies that he was responsible for his sister's death. He shoots the girl in the heart and then the head. Before dying, the girl's body turns into Komomo.The epilogue finds Christopher in a Japanese prison serving time for the murder of the girl. When he is given a water ration, he hallucinates the bucket contains an aborted fetus, and cradles the bucket while singing a lullaby, kept company only by the ghosts of Komomo and his dead sister.

SOLUTION: Who plays "the boatman"?

PROBLEM: Tilo (Aishwarya Rai), an immigrant from India, is a shopkeeper, an unusually strong clairvoyant, and a chosen Mistress of Spices. The Spices she gives to her customers help them to satisfy their certain needs and desires, such as "sandalwood to dispel painful memories; black cumin seed to protect against evil eye."As a young girl, Tilo was initiated as one of several young Mistresses of Spices by the First Mother (Zohra Sehgal), who warns the girls about certain rules they must follow, or face dire consequences. They are instructed never to leave their respective stores all around the world, physically touch the skin of the people they meet, or use the great and incomprehensible strength and power of the Spices to their own ends.Tilo ends up in the San Francisco Bay Area in a store called "Spice Bazaar". Tilo's customers include Haroun, a cab driver (Nitin Ganatra), a grandfather (Anupam Kher) dealing with an American-born granddaughter Geeta (Padma Lakshmi), Kwesi, a man trying to impress his girlfriend (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Jagjit, a teenager trying to fit in at school (Sonny Gill Dulay).Her life takes a turn one day, when a young architect named Doug (Dylan McDermott) crashes his motorcycle outside her store. Tilo tends to his injuries while trying to ignore their mutual romantic attraction. Her life changes when he touches her and they begin to fall in love.But the Spices are suddenly angry and jealous, and things soon start to go sour in her relationships with her other customers. Haroun gets in an accident, Geeta's family situation does not improve, Jagjit falls in with the wrong crowd at school, and Kwesi's girlfriend breaks up with him. Doug comes to meet her that night and sadly tells her that his Native American-born mother had died.Tilo recognizes that the source of these misfortunes is her breaking of the rules. The First Mother comes to her in a vision and scolds her for choosing Doug over the Spices. She vows that she will return to India, and posts a notice about a closing sale. She goes all out to help her customers one last time and tells the Spices that she will spend just one night with Doug, and then she will give herself utterly to them. She closes the store and goes off with Doug for the night. After a night of love-making, she leaves him a note that she must leave and cannot return, but that she will always deeply love him. Then she goes back to the store and sets the Spices on fire, with her at the center of the flames, as a sign of eternal servitude and slavery to the mystical Spices.Doug comes searching for her, and finds the store devastated. But Tilo has not been burned after all; she is still there, alive and barely conscious. There is no sign of a fire, but there has been an earthquake. We see a vision of the First Mother sitting at the beach, telling her that because she demonstrated her willingness to give up everything for the Spices, now she can have everything she desires and the Spices will never desert her again. Doug agrees to help her rebuild the store, and she happily reunites with him as they walk along the beach holding hands.

SOLUTION: What did she choose Doug over?

PROBLEM: A dust speck is dislodged from its obscure place and sent adrift through the Jungle of Nool. At the same time, Horton the elephant (Jim Carrey), the jungle's eccentric nature teacher, takes a dip in the pool. The dust speck floats past him in the air, and he hears a tiny yelp coming from it. Believing that an entire society of microscopic creatures are living on that speck, he places it atop of a clover. Horton finds out the speck harbors the city of Whoville and its inhabitants, the Whos, led by Mayor Ned McDodd (Steve Carell).He has a wife, Sally (Amy Poehler), 96 daughters (whose names all begin with the letter H), and one teenage son named JoJo (Jesse McCartney). Despite being the oldest and next in line for the mayoral position, JoJo doesn't want to be the next mayor, and because he's so scared of disappointing his father, never speaks. Once Horton begins carrying the speck with him, the city starts experiencing strange phenomena (earthquakes and changes in the weather), and the Mayor finds his attempts to caution Whoville challenged by the Town Council, led by the opportunistic yet condescending Chairman (Dan Fogler).After he makes contact with Horton, the Mayor finds out from Dr. Mary Lou LaRue (Isla Fisher) that Whoville will be destroyed if Horton does not find a "safer, more stable home". Horton resolves (with the help of his best friend Morton the mouse (Seth Rogen)) to place the speck atop Mt. Nool, the safest place in the jungle. The head of the jungle, the Sour Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), disbelieving Horton's beliefs and resenting him for overshadowing her authority, attempts several times to demand that Horton give up the speck, but Horton ignores her demands. Also taking force toward Horton are the Wickersham Brothers, a group of monkeys who love making misery. Eventually, the Kangaroo enlists a vulture named Vlad Vladikoff (Will Arnett) to get rid of the speck by force.Vlad manages to steal the clover away from Horton and drops it into a massive field of identical pink clovers, causing an apocalyptic tremor in Whoville. After unsuccessfully picking nearly 3,000,000 clovers, Horton eventually recovers the clover (exactly the 3,000,000th clover). The Kangaroo eventually finds out (thanks by Mrs. Quilligan (Jaime Pressly)) that Horton still has the speck, and decides to rally the jungle community into fighting Horton, saying that Horton's goal will lead to anarchy. Upon cornering him, the Kangaroo offers Horton an escape from punishment by renouncing Whoville's existence.When Horton refuses, in spite of his heartfelt speech, the Kangaroo orders the animals to rope and cage him, and to have the speck and the Whos destroyed in a pot of boiling beezlenut oil. The Mayor enlists all of his people to make noise by shouting "We are here!", as well as playing a variety of instruments, so the animals may hear them, assisted by Jojo's "Symphonophone", an invention which creates a huge musical contribution, but still fails to penetrate the surface of the speck.As Horton lies beaten and captured, the Kangaroo easily takes the clover, and releases it. Meanwhile, JoJo grabs the horn used to project Horton's voice, runs up the highest tower and screams "YOPP!", breaking through the sound barrier just seconds before the speck hits the oil.The Kangaroo's son, Rudy (Josh Flitter) grabs the clover and returns it to Horton. The animals finally hear the Whos and realize the truth and isolate the Kangaroo for (without knowing by herself) tricking them. While being praised for his integrity by his neighbors, Horton even forgives the devastated Kangaroo, and she befriends him with a makeshift umbrella for Whoville. Here, the people of Whoville and the animals of Nool gather in song and recite the chorus from "Can't Fight This Feeling". The film ends with the narrator (Charles Osgood) revealing that the Jungle of Nool, or rather Earth, is just one speck, like Whoville, among numerous others, floating in outer space.

SOLUTION:
Where is the safest place in the jungle?