praj-17/QA-MCQ-Open-ended huggingface dataset:
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: In 2006, Lee was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. During the ceremony, the students and audience gave Lee a standing ovation, and the entire graduating class held up copies of To Kill a Mockingbird to honor her.[note 5] Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 5, 2007 by President George W. Bush. In his remarks, Bush stated, "One reason To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded is the wise and kind heart of the author, which comes through on every page ... To Kill a Mockingbird has influenced the character of our country for the better. It's been a gift to the entire world. As a model of good writing and humane sensibility, this book will be read and studied forever."

question: Which school granted Lee an honory doctorate in 2006? 

answer: University of Notre Dame

question: Which president of the US awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom? 

answer: George W. Bush

question: When did Lee receive a  Presidential Medal of Freedom? 

answer: 2007

question: What university awarded Lee an honorary doctorate in 2006? 

answer: Notre Dame

question: In 2007, which president awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom? 

answer: George W. Bush
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The book was made into the well-received 1962 film with the same title, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. The film's producer, Alan J. Pakula, remembered Universal Pictures executives questioning him about a potential script: "They said, 'What story do you plan to tell for the film?' I said, 'Have you read the book?' They said, 'Yes.' I said, 'That's the story.'" The movie was a hit at the box office, quickly grossing more than $20 million from a $2-million budget. It won three Oscars: Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Horton Foote. It was nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout.

question: A movie adaptation of the book was released in what year? 

answer: 1962

question: Who played Atticus Finch in the 1962 movie of the same title? 

answer: Gregory Peck

question: Which actor received An Oscar for his role of Atticus Finch in the 1962 movie of the book? 

answer: Gregory Peck
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Harper Lee was pleased with the movie, saying: "In that film the man and the part met... I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused. That film was a work of art." Peck met Lee's father, the model for Atticus, before the filming. Lee's father died before the film's release, and Lee was so impressed with Peck's performance that she gave him her father's pocketwatch, which he had with him the evening he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. Years later, he was reluctant to tell Lee that the watch was stolen out of his luggage in London Heathrow Airport. When Peck eventually did tell Lee, he said she responded, "'Well, it's only a watch.' Harper—she feels deeply, but she's not a sentimental person about things." Lee and Peck shared a friendship long after the movie was made. Peck's grandson was named "Harper" in her honor.

question: What item did Lee give the actor Gregory Peck after portraying Atticus Finch? 

answer: father's pocketwatch

question: Which one of Gregory Peck's relatives was named after Harper Lee? 

answer: grandson

question: What personal effect did Lee give to Peck? 

answer: her father's pocketwatch

question: Which one of Peck's relatives was named Harper in honor of Lee? 

answer: grandson
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: In May 2005, Lee made an uncharacteristic appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library at the request of Peck's widow Veronique, who said of Lee: "She's like a national treasure. She's someone who has made a difference...with this book. The book is still as strong as it ever was, and so is the film. All the kids in the United States read this book and see the film in the seventh and eighth grades and write papers and essays. My husband used to get thousands and thousands of letters from teachers who would send them to him."

question: When did Lee randomly show up at the Los Angeles  Public Library? 

answer: May 2005

question: What did Peck's widow call Lee? 

answer: a national treasure
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The book has also been adapted as a play by Christopher Sergel. It debuted in 1990 in Monroeville, a town that labels itself "The Literary Capital of Alabama". The play runs every May on the county courthouse grounds and townspeople make up the cast. White male audience members are chosen at the intermission to make up the jury. During the courtroom scene the production moves into the Monroe County Courthouse and the audience is racially segregated. Author Albert Murray said of the relationship of the town to the novel (and the annual performance): "It becomes part of the town ritual, like the religious underpinning of Mardi Gras. With the whole town crowded around the actual courthouse, it's part of a central, civic education—what Monroeville aspires to be."

question: Who turned the novel into a play? 

answer: Christopher Sergel

question: When was the play for To Kill a Mockingbird first performed? 

answer: 1990

question: What town labeled itself "The Literary Capital of Alabama"? 

answer: Monroeville

question: Who makes up the cast of the annual play based on the book performed in Monroeville? 

answer: townspeople

question: During the courtroom scene, what happens to the audience? 

answer: racially segregated
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Sergel's play toured in the UK starting at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 2006, and again in 2011 starting at the York Theatre Royal, both productions featuring Duncan Preston as Atticus Finch. The play also opened the 2013 season at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London where it played to full houses and starred Robert Sean Leonard as Atticus Finch, his first London appearance in 22 years. The production is returning to the venue to close the 2014 season, prior to a UK Tour.

question: What country did Sergel's play tour around in and perform in 2006? 

answer: the UK

question: The play was the opening act for the starting of the 2013 season at which location? 

answer: Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

question: Who played Atticus Finch in the UK theater productions of the film in 2006 and 2011? 

answer: Duncan Preston
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: An earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, titled Go Set a Watchman, was controversially released on July 14, 2015. This draft, which was completed in 1957, is set 20 years after the time period depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird but is not a continuation of the narrative. This earlier version of the story follows an adult Scout Finch who travels from New York to visit her father, Atticus Finch, in Maycomb, Alabama, where she is confronted by the intolerance in her community. The Watchman manuscript was believed to have been lost until Lee's lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it; although this claim has been widely disputed. Watchman contains early versions of many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird. According to Lee's agent Andrew Nurnberg, Mockingbird was originally intended to be the first book of a trilogy: "They discussed publishing Mockingbird first, Watchman last, and a shorter connecting novel between the two." This assertion has been discredited however by the rare books expert James S. Jaffe, who reviewed the pages at the request of Lee's attorney and found them to be only another draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird". The statement was also contrary to Jonathan Mahler's description of how "Watchman" was seen as just the first draft of "Mockingbird". Instances where many passages overlap between the two books, in some case word for word, also refutes this assertion.

question: When was Go Set a Watchman introduced to the public? 

answer: July 14, 2015

question: Go Set a Watchman was finished in what year? 

answer: 1957

question: How many years after To Kill a Mockingbird is the setting of Go Set A Watchman? 

answer: 20

question: Who was Harper Lee's lawyer? 

answer: Tonja Carter

question: What is the earlier draft of the book titled? 

answer: Go Set a Watchman

question: What year was Watchman completed? 

answer: 1957

question: How many years after Mockingbird was Watchman set? 

answer: 20
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

question: What two serious moral issues are dealt with in the novel? 

answer: rape and racial inequality

question: Who is the protagonist of the novel? 

answer: Atticus Finch
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The strongest element of style noted by critics and reviewers is Lee's talent for narration, which in an early review in Time was called "tactile brilliance". Writing a decade later, another scholar noted, "Harper Lee has a remarkable gift of story-telling. Her art is visual, and with cinematographic fluidity and subtlety we see a scene melting into another scene without jolts of transition." Lee combines the narrator's voice of a child observing her surroundings with a grown woman's reflecting on her childhood, using the ambiguity of this voice combined with the narrative technique of flashback to play intricately with perspectives. This narrative method allows Lee to tell a "delightfully deceptive" story that mixes the simplicity of childhood observation with adult situations complicated by hidden motivations and unquestioned tradition. However, at times the blending causes reviewers to question Scout's preternatural vocabulary and depth of understanding. Both Harding LeMay and the novelist and literary critic Granville Hicks expressed doubt that children as sheltered as Scout and Jem could understand the complexities and horrors involved in the trial for Tom Robinson's life.

question: What is Lee's strongest style of writing? 

answer: narration

question: What narrative technique does Lee use to combine the adult's perspective with the child's observations?? 

answer: flashback
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Harper Lee has remained famously detached from interpreting the novel since the mid-1960s. However, she gave some insight into her themes when, in a rare letter to the editor, she wrote in response to the passionate reaction her book caused: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."

question: According to Lee, her book simply expressed a Christian code of honor and conduct inherit to whom? 

answer: all Southerners
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: When the book was released, reviewers noted that it was divided into two parts, and opinion was mixed about Lee's ability to connect them. The first part of the novel concerns the children's fascination with Boo Radley and their feelings of safety and comfort in the neighborhood. Reviewers were generally charmed by Scout and Jem's observations of their quirky neighbors. One writer was so impressed by Lee's detailed explanations of the people of Maycomb that he categorized the book as Southern romantic regionalism. This sentimentalism can be seen in Lee's representation of the Southern caste system to explain almost every character's behavior in the novel. Scout's Aunt Alexandra attributes Maycomb's inhabitants' faults and advantages to genealogy (families that have gambling streaks and drinking streaks), and the narrator sets the action and characters amid a finely detailed background of the Finch family history and the history of Maycomb. This regionalist theme is further reflected in Mayella Ewell's apparent powerlessness to admit her advances toward Tom Robinson, and Scout's definition of "fine folks" being people with good sense who do the best they can with what they have. The South itself, with its traditions and taboos, seems to drive the plot more than the characters.

question: Besides the children's fascination with Boo, the first part of the book was concerned about their feelings for what? 

answer: the neighborhood

question: Lee's detailed explanations of the characters' behaviors caused one writer to catagorize the book as what? 

answer: Southern romantic regionalism

question: Scout defined people doing the best they could with what they had as who? 

answer: fine folks

question: What drives the plot of the book more than the characters? 

answer: The South itself
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Tom Robinson is the chief example among several innocents destroyed carelessly or deliberately throughout the novel. However, scholar Christopher Metress connects the mockingbird to Boo Radley: "Instead of wanting to exploit Boo for her own fun (as she does in the beginning of the novel by putting on gothic plays about his history), Scout comes to see him as a 'mockingbird'—that is, as someone with an inner goodness that must be cherished." The last pages of the book illustrate this as Scout relates the moral of a story Atticus has been reading to her, and in allusions to both Boo Radley and Tom Robinson states about a character who was misunderstood, "when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things ... Atticus, he was real nice," to which he responds, "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

question: Who is the main example of an innocent destroyed in the novel? 

answer: Tom Robinson

question: What  does Scout see symbollically as a mockingbird? 

answer: Boo Radley

question: According to Atticus, most people are how when you truly view them? 

answer: real nice
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The novel exposes the loss of innocence so frequently that reviewer R. A. Dave claims that because every character has to face, or even suffer defeat, the book takes on elements of a classical tragedy. In exploring how each character deals with his or her own personal defeat, Lee builds a framework to judge whether the characters are heroes or fools. She guides the reader in such judgments, alternating between unabashed adoration and biting irony. Scout's experience with the Missionary Society is an ironic juxtaposition of women who mock her, gossip, and "reflect a smug, colonialist attitude toward other races" while giving the "appearance of gentility, piety, and morality". Conversely, when Atticus loses Tom's case, he is last to leave the courtroom, except for his children and the black spectators in the colored balcony, who rise silently as he walks underneath them, to honor his efforts.

question: Reviewer R. A. Dave classified the novel how? 

answer: classical tragedy
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Initial reactions to the novel were varied. The New Yorker declared it "skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenious", and The Atlantic Monthly's reviewer rated it as "pleasant, undemanding reading", but found the narrative voice—"a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult"—to be implausible. Time magazine's 1960 review of the book states that it "teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life" and calls Scout Finch "the most appealing child since Carson McCullers' Frankie got left behind at the wedding". The Chicago Sunday Tribune noted the even-handed approach to the narration of the novel's events, writing: "This is in no way a sociological novel. It underlines no cause ... To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel of strong contemporary national significance."

question: What newspaper wrote that the novel has strong contemporary national significance? 

answer: The Chicago Sunday Tribune
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Not all reviewers were enthusiastic. Some lamented the use of poor white Southerners, and one-dimensional black victims, and Granville Hicks labeled the book "melodramatic and contrived". When the book was first released, Southern writer Flannery O'Connor commented, "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is." Carson McCullers apparently agreed with the Time magazine review, writing to a cousin: "Well, honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves."

question: Which reviewer called the book melodramatic and contrived? 

answer: Granville Hicks

question: Which Southern writer deemed it a child's book? 

answer: Flannery O'Connor
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: The 50th anniversary of the novel's release was met with celebrations and reflections on its impact. Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune praises Lee's "rich use of language" but writes that the central lesson is that "courage isn't always flashy, isn't always enough, but is always in style". Jane Sullivan in the Sydney Morning Herald agrees, stating that the book "still rouses fresh and horrified indignation" as it examines morality, a topic that has recently become unfashionable. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing in The Guardian states that Lee, rare among American novelists, writes with "a fiercely progressive ink, in which there is nothing inevitable about racism and its very foundation is open to question", comparing her to William Faulkner, who wrote about racism as an inevitability. Literary critic Rosemary Goring in Scotland's The Herald notes the connections between Lee and Jane Austen, stating the book's central theme, that "one’s moral convictions are worth fighting for, even at the risk of being reviled" is eloquently discussed.

question: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie vompared Lee to whom? 

answer: William Faulkner

question: Rosemary  Goring connected Lee to whom? 

answer: Jane Austen
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Native Alabamian Allen Barra sharply criticized Lee and the novel in The Wall Street Journal calling Atticus a "repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" and the novel represents a "sugar-coated myth" of Alabama history. Barra writes, "It's time to stop pretending that To Kill a Mockingbird is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated". Thomas Mallon in The New Yorker criticizes Atticus' stiff and self-righteous demeanor, and calls Scout "a kind of highly constructed doll" whose speech and actions are improbable. Although acknowledging that the novel works, Mallon blasts Lee's "wildly unstable" narrative voice for developing a story about a content neighborhood until it begins to impart morals in the courtroom drama, following with his observation that "the book has begun to cherish its own goodness" by the time the case is over.[note 2] Defending the book, Akin Ajayi writes that justice "is often complicated, but must always be founded upon the notion of equality and fairness for all." Ajayi states that the book forces readers to question issues about race, class, and society, but that it was not written to resolve them.

question: Who criticized Lee in The Wall Street Journal? 

answer: Allen Barra

question: Who wrote that the book forces readers to question issues without resolving them? 

answer: Akin Ajayi
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Furthermore, despite the novel's thematic focus on racial injustice, its black characters are not fully examined. In its use of racial epithets, stereotyped depictions of superstitious blacks, and Calpurnia, who to some critics is an updated version of the "contented slave" motif and to others simply unexplored, the book is viewed as marginalizing black characters. One writer asserts that the use of Scout's narration serves as a convenient mechanism for readers to be innocent and detached from the racial conflict. Scout's voice "functions as the not-me which allows the rest of us—black and white, male and female—to find our relative position in society". A teaching guide for the novel published by The English Journal cautions, "what seems wonderful or powerful to one group of students may seem degrading to another". A Canadian language arts consultant found that the novel resonated well with white students, but that black students found it "demoralizing". Another criticism, articulated by Michael Lind, is that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural "white trash".

question: Which character has some critics deemed a variation of a contented slave? 

answer: Calpurnia

question: According to one consultant, which group found the book demoralizing? 

answer: black students

question: Michael Lund criticized the novel for demonizing whom? 

answer: poor rural "white trash"
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birmingham civil rights campaign, asserts that To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism instead of racists, and states that every child in the South has moments of racial cognitive dissonance when they are faced with the harsh reality of inequality. This feeling causes them to question the beliefs with which they have been raised, which for many children is what the novel does. McWhorter writes of Lee, "for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest."[note 4] Author James McBride calls Lee brilliant but stops short of calling her brave: "I think by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own racism ... She certainly set the standards in terms of how these issues need to be discussed, but in many ways I feel ... the moral bar's been lowered. And that's really distressing. We need a thousand Atticus Finches." McBride, however, defends the book's sentimentality, and the way Lee approaches the story with "honesty and integrity".

question: According to Diane McWhorter, every child in the South had to face what? 

answer: the harsh reality of inequality

question: McWhorter wrote that the existance of the book was what? 

answer: an act of protest
Title: To_Kill_a_Mockingbird
Context: According to a National Geographic article, the novel is so revered in Monroeville that people quote lines from it like Scripture; yet Harper Lee herself refused to attend any performances, because "she abhors anything that trades on the book's fame". To underscore this sentiment, Lee demanded that a book of recipes named Calpurnia's Cookbook not be published and sold out of the Monroe County Heritage Museum. David Lister in The Independent states that Lee's refusal to speak to reporters made them desire to interview her all the more, and her silence "makes Bob Dylan look like a media tart". Despite her discouragement, a rising number of tourists made to Monroeville a destination, hoping to see Lee's inspiration for the book, or Lee herself. Local residents call them "Mockingbird groupies", and although Lee was not reclusive, she refused publicity and interviews with an emphatic "Hell, no!"

question: How do the citizens of Monroeville quote lines of the book? 

answer: like Scripture

question: What do the Monroeville townspeople call tourists to their town? 

answer: Mockingbird groupies