TASK DEFINITION: In this task you will be given a text passage from a trivia quiz. You should choose the category this question belongs to from these categories: History, Science, Social Science, Fine Arts, Literature. You can only choose one category, so if in doubt, please choose the closest match.
PROBLEM: In one of this author's short stories, the title character is killed after taking a boy hostage, after which his body is dumped in an unused mine and stinks up the village. In addition to The Catch, this author has recently completed the trilogy The Flaming Green Tree, a work he claims will be his last. Other works by him include a four-volume collection that contains a story about the boy Eeyore, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, and a novel about children who are taken to a remote village after a plague breaks out. The birth of Bird's child with a brain hernia parallels this man's own experiences with his retarded son and is central to his A Personal Matter. FTP, identify this author of Nip the Bud, Shoot the Kids, who also wrote about the brothers Mitsu and Takashi in The Silent Cry.

SOLUTION: Literature

PROBLEM: When reacted with a nitrile, they produce an imine anion that can be hydrolyzed into a ketone, and they can cause nucleophilic ring opening of epoxides. Pouring a solution of them over dry ice followed by protonation results in carboxylic acids, which will not form addition products with these. One of their most common uses is reacting with aldehydes and ketones to form secondary and tertiary alcohols, respectively. Because they essentially act as carbanions, they can be protonated by weak acids to yield alkanes. FTP name these organometallic reagents that are formed by reacting an alkyl halide with magnesium, named for their French discoverer.

SOLUTION: Science

PROBLEM: This author of the plays "The Confidential Clerk" and "The Elder Statesman" wrote fan letters to Groucho Marx and kept a picture of him on his mantle beside Yeats and Paul Valery. His second volume of poetry, "Ara vos prec", carries his early cynicism to extremes, as seen in works like "Gerontion" and the Sweeney poems, while his conversion to Anglicanism in the late 1920s is reflected in his late poems, including "Journey of the Magi", "Ash Wednesday", and "Four Quartets". FTP, name this poet probably best known for his long poem "The Waste Land".

SOLUTION:
Literature