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:  Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a Hollywood screenwriter whose alcoholism costs him his job, family, and friends. With nothing left to live for, he heads to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. As he drives drunkenly down the Las Vegas Strip, he nearly hits a woman, Sera (Shue), on the crosswalk. Sera chastises him and walks away. Sera is a prostitute working for an abusive pimp, Yuri Butso (Julian Sands), a Latvian immigrant. Polish mobsters are after Yuri, so he breaks his relationship with Sera in fear that the Poles may hurt her. Yuri is murdered (off-screen) shortly afterwards.
On his second day in Las Vegas, Ben goes looking for Sera, introduces himself and offers her $500 to come to his room for an hour. Sera agrees but Ben does not want sex. Instead, they only talk and form a bizarre romantic relationship and Sera invites to Ben to move into her apartment. Ben instructs Sera never to ask him to stop drinking. Sera asks Ben not to criticize her occupation. At first the two are happy, as Ben is "totally at ease with this (Sera's prostitution)." However, each becomes frustrated with the other's behavior. Sera begs Ben to see a doctor which makes him furious. While Sera is out working Ben goes to a casino and returns with another prostitute (Mariska Hargitay). Sera returns to find them in her bed and throws Ben out. Shortly afterward Sera is approached by three college students at the Excalibur hotel and casino. She initially rejects their offer by stating that she only "dates" one at a time, but eventually acquiesces when she is offered an increased price. When she enters their hotel room, the college students change the deal and request anal sex, which Sera refuses. When she attempts to leave, she is brutally attacked and raped. The next morning, she is spotted by her landlady returning home battered and is evicted. Sera receives a call from Ben, who is on his deathbed. Sera visits Ben, and the two make love. He dies shortly thereafter. In the final scene, Sera explains to her therapist that she accepted Ben for who he was and loved him.

SOLUTION: Why was the Sanderson kicked out of the prostitute's apartment?

PROBLEM:  Mary Horowitz, a crossword puzzle writer for the Sacramento Herald, is socially awkward and considers her pet hamster her only true friend.
Her parents decide to set her up on a blind date. Mary's expectations are low, as she tells her hamster. Mary is pleasantly surprised when her date turns out to be handsome and charming Steve Miller, a cameraman for the television news network CCN. Steve does not reciprocate her feelings. After an attempt at an intimate moment fails, in part because of her awkwardness and inability to stop talking about vocabulary, Steve fakes a phone call about covering the news out of town. Trying to get Mary out of his truck, he tells her he wishes she could be there.
Mary believes him and decides to pursue him. Mary's obsession gets her fired when she creates a crossword titled "All About Steve". Following her termination, Mary decides to track Steve around the country in the hopes of winning his affection. She is encouraged by CCN news reporter Hartman Hughes, who hopes to use Mary's encyclopedic knowledge in his reports to help himself get a promotion to become an anchor. On the road, Mary annoys some bus passengers so much, the driver abandons her. She hitchhikes with a trucker named Norm, then meets and travels with a pair of protesters, Elizabeth, a ditzy but sweet and likeable girl, and Howard, who sells apples he carves into celebrities. She gradually grows close to the two.
Steve and crew end up covering a breaking news story: an old mine collapsed with numerous deaf children stuck inside. Initially, it appears that the children are rescued. Mary, who arrives on the scene, accidentally falls into the mine shaft as well while making a beeline for Steve. It turns out that not all the children have been rescued, and Mary is trapped with one left behind. Steve begins to realize that Mary, in her own unique way, is a beautiful person. Just as Mary figures a way out, the two are joined by Hartman, who is made to feel guilty by Elizabeth and Howard for getting Mary into this predicament. Mary's rescue plan works, but she lets Hartman take the credit. Mary finally realizes she does not need Steve to be happy. She states, "If you love someone, set him free; if you have to stalk him, he probably wasn't yours in the first place."
After the end credits, a competitive TV reporter, in despair that Hartman got popularity by falling into the mine while trying to save Mary, also jumps into the mine.

SOLUTION: What happens to Mary when she arrives to the scene of the collapsed mine?

PROBLEM:  This memoir tells of a precocious boy who loved the sights and sounds of his childhood but felt reticent about full participation in life. The note is sounded from the first chapters, as James recounts the limitations and rewards of the child he was:
"For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to be somewhere almost anywhere would do and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go without many things, ever so many as all people do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere...he was to enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it."
James clearly suffered from a sense of his inferiority in the "showy", active parts of life. His older brother William always seemed superior in ability; his classmates scorned his hopelessness at math and science; even at a party he felt too embarrassed to join in the dancing.
But he still observed and fantasized about all his family and his surroundings had to offer. When a cousin of his was told "don't make a scene," he suddenly realized that scenes could be made by telling a story or inventing a play. He went often to the theater and fell forever under its spell. His family met William Thackeray and Charles Dickens on their American tours, and James even remembered Thackeray mock-scolding his sister Alice for her crinoline dress: "Crinoline? I was suspecting it! So young and so depraved!"
In fact, for all his surface diffidence, James harbored almost Napoleonic dreams of glory as an artist. Near the close of A Small Boy and Others he tells how, in much later years, he dreamed of routing a monstrous attacker and chasing him away through the halls of the Louvre, which he had seen as a child. The small boy, as hesitant and uncertain as he might seem, would triumph over his fears and develop his superb aptitude for narrative fiction.

SOLUTION:
Who mocked James' sister, Alice?