TASK DEFINITION: You will be given a summary of a story. You need to create a question that can be answered from the story. You can create a question about characters, events, facts and beliefs, etc. Your question should be specific, try not to use pronouns instead of full names. As the stories are sometimes movie plots, they will contain actor names in parentheses. You should not use those names. Only use character names. Try to ask a question about all parts of the plot, not just the beginning.
PROBLEM:  The first story, "The Blonde Lady", opens with the purchase of an antique desk by a mathematics professor. The desk is subsequently stolen, as it turns out, by Ars ne Lupin. Later, both Lupin and the professor realize that a lottery ticket, left inadvertently in the desk, is the winning ticket, and Lupin proceeds to ensure he obtains half of the winnings while executing a near-impossible escape with a blonde lady. After the theft of the Blue Diamond, again by a blonde lady, Ganimard made the connection to Lupin and an appeal was made to Herlock Sholmes to match wits with Lupin. Inadvertently, Lupin and his biographer met with the newly arrived Sholmes and his assistant, Wilson, in a Parisian restaurant, and they shared a cautious d tente before Lupin sets off to lay his traps. Despite Lupin's efforts, Sholmes is able to unveil the identity of the blonde lady and Lupin's involvement in the crimes linked to her. Lupin succeeded in trapping Sholmes, however, and sends him off to Southampton in a boat, but Sholmes manages to escape back to Paris and engineer the arrest of Lupin. After Sholmes leaves, however, Lupin outfoxes his French captors and manages to bid farewell to Sholmes and Wilson at the Gare du Nord.
"The Jewish Lamp" opens with another appeal to Herlock Sholmes for help in recovering a Jewish lamp. After reading the appeal, Sholmes is shocked to read a second letter, this time by Lupin and arriving on the same day's post, which warns him not to intervene. Sholmes is outraged by Lupin's audacity and resolves to go to Paris. At the Gare du Nord, Sholmes is accosted by a young lady, who again warns him not to intervene, and finds that the Echo de France, Lupin's mouthpiece newspaper, is proclaiming his arrival. Sholmes proceeds to investigate the crime and finds out the true reason for Lupin's appeal not to intervene.

SOLUTION: What type of professor first buys the desk?

PROBLEM:  To Epicurus, the unhappiness and degradation of humans arose largely from the dread which they entertained of the power of the deities, from terror of their wrath. This wrath was supposed to be displayed by the misfortunes inflicted in this life and by the everlasting tortures that were the lot of the guilty in a future state (or, where these feelings were not strongly developed, from a vague dread of gloom and misery after death). To remove these fears, and thus to establish tranquility in the heart, was the purpose of his teaching. Thus the deities, whose existence he did not deny, lived forevermore in the enjoyment of absolute peace, strangers to all the passions, desires, and fears, which agitate the human heart, totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes.
To prove this position he called upon the atomism of Democritus, so as to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being, but by the mixing of elemental particles that had existed from all eternity governed by certain simple laws. Lucretius' task was to clearly state and fully develop these views in an attractive form; his work was an attempt to show that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings.
Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the deities created our world or interfere with its operations in some way. He argues against fear of such deities by demonstrating, through observations and arguments, that the operations of the world can be accounted for in terms of natural phenomena. These phenomena are the regular, but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space. Meanwhile, he argues against the fear of death by stating that death is the dissipation of a being's material mind. Lucretius uses the analogy of a vessel, stating that the physical body is the vessel that holds both the mind (mens) and spirit (anima) of a human being. Neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body. Thus Lucretius states that once the vessel (the body) shatters (dies) its contents (mind and spirit) can no longer exist. So, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being. Being completely devoid of sensation and thought, a dead person cannot miss being alive. According to Lucretius, fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel. Lucretius also puts forward the 'symmetry argument' against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which probably did not cause them much suffering.

SOLUTION: What particles does Epicurus want to learn about?

PROBLEM:  The story begins with the childhood and exceptional and accomplished youth of Prince Stepan Kasatsky. The young man is destined for great things. He discovers on the eve of his wedding that his fianc e Countess Mary Korotkova has had an affair with his beloved Tsar Nicholas I. The blow to his pride is massive, and he retreats to the arms of Russian Orthodoxy and becomes a monk. Many years of humility and doubt follow. He is ordered to become a hermit. Despite his being removed from the world, he is still remembered for having so remarkably transformed his life. One winter night, a group of merry-makers decide to visit him, and one of them, a divorced woman named Makovkina, spends the night in his cell, with the intention to seduce him. Father Sergius discovers he is still weak and in order to protect himself, cuts off his own finger. Makovkina is stunned by this act, and leaves the next morning, having vowed to change her life. A year later she has joined a convent. Father Sergius' reputation for holiness grows. He becomes known as a healer, and pilgrims come from far and wide. Yet Father Sergius is profoundly aware of his inability to attain a true faith. He is still tortured by boredom, pride, and lust. He fails a new test, when the young daughter of a merchant successfully beds him. The morning after, he leaves the monastery and seeks out his cousin Pashenka (Praskovya Mikhaylovna), whom he, with a group of other boys, had tormented many years ago. He finds her, now in all the conventional senses a failure in life, yet imbued with a sense of service towards her family. His path is now clearer. He begins to wander, until eight months later he is arrested in the company of a blind beggar who makes him feel closer to God. He is sent to Siberia, where he now works as the hired man of a well-to-do peasant, teaching the gentleman's young children and working in the gardens.

SOLUTION:
Where is Father Sergius sent after his arrest?