*Question*
He picked me up at my house, and after getting back on the main road he turned up the volume on the radio. "Why do you even listen to that stuff?" I asked. It was schlock-rock, simple and unadorned wailing backed by incessantly grating guitars. "I don't really know." "You don't actually like it, do you?" I knew he didn't; I knew what he preferred. His apartment walls were lined with recordings of classical, even archaic music, European folk instrumentals. Maybe rock, once in a while, but he had had something amplified and pitch-altered on every time we'd been together lately. "I think we listen to pop music to punish ourselves," he said. "An aural bed of nails to compensate for our sins." "Those sins being...?" "I don't know... sometimes, don't you ever get so sick of everything you just want to cram your ears full of garbage to spite it all?" This was not normal second-date dialogue, but Phillip and I had known each other for a long time. "It's like you'd rather inflict pain," he said, "like you want to inflict pain on yourself, just for pure spite against... the stuff around us." "You'd choke on garbage to get back at a culture who would do it for you anyway?" "Yeah, kind of. Does that make sense?" "In a very cliched, pop-psychology sort of way, yes." I turned down the volume, then shut the radio off entirely. "Don't you ever want to hurt like that?" he asked. "It's why you read some thriller instead of a classic, it's why you watch TV instead of reading a book, it's why you watch a sitcom instead of PBS, it's why you watch Family Guy instead of the Simpsons." (I might have snorted at this point.) "Because you have to do the bad thing." At the end of this story, the radio in Phillip's car is: - Blaring loudly - Turned off - Playing classical music - not enough information
**Answer**
Turned off

*Question*
Thanks Richard for asking. Yes. I have something to tell. We have record rainfall during 24 hours in Lahore, breaking previous one day record by more than 60%. Our drainage system is pathetic. Other systems such as telephone, electricity, cable etc. are no better. Poor planning has further been aggravated by extremely mismanaged maintenance and operational bugs. This morning, when I was out for our fajr (morning prayers) in masjid, a neighbor told me that the pole laden with electricity meters was under fire. After that he buzzed off for complaint office. When I returned after prayers, I saw fire reaching cable part after meter; one meter had caught fire and other meters (including ours) was in danger of catching fire. It was still dark. I waited for someone to come out. No one appeared. I came inside and told my wife about and went again out to see if I could find someone to go about extinguishing fire. IT WAS DAM RISKY AS DIGGING WAS DONE BY TELEPHONE COMPANY AND RAINS HAD MADE A MESS ON OUR STREET. No one was seen. My wife came out; brought hose pipe. I managed to use it as water gun and there was some post-extinguishing sparking; fire was put out. I want to add here that hose pipe should only be used when someone knows how to send bursts of water so that electric current cannot build a circuit. Later in day we heard about the most stupid thing; people were inside their houses, watching flames from pole but not knowing what to do. THEY DID NOT EVEN COME OUT TO SHARE THE ACTIVITY. That has happened today. I am going to ask everyone about it one by one. Also, I am still looking for the guy who went to complaint office and was never seen thereafter this morning. That can happen to anybody. When did the narrator try to extinguish the fire? - After prayer - not enough information - Before prayer - During prayer
**Answer**
After prayer

*Question*
Rain, the young man is thinking. Of course it would be raining. Not a heavy, cleansing rain that leaves the streets steaming and the neatly sculptured yards lush and fragrant. This is a gray drizzling rain. A rain that makes him think of places like England and Scotland as they appear in those disturbing late night films on cable, the ones in black and white that weren't particularly memorable when they were made and are even less so now. Still, it rains and the air is cool. All he has to shelter him is a think nylon jacket. The jacket is soaked. It feels both chilly and coarse against his skin. His hair hangs in flat and sodden wings, falling into his eyes. It's long in the back, almost to his shoulders, and he thinks that the cars that pass him on the street, the occupants of those cars, might look at him and see only that he is wet and not that he is dirty as well. Can they tell that his hair has been unwashed for days? That his clothes are the same ones he's worn for more than a week? It doesn't matter. He's invisible to them as soon as they pass, taking any assumptions they might make with them. They might just mistake him for one of those hoity-toity college kids, one of those clean limbed and beaming have's who has happened to find himself caught out without his umbrella. He makes a desultory attempt to straighten his shoulders, to lift his eyes from the buckled sidewalk. To look like he might have a purpose or a destination. It doesn't help. He has become the day. He has internalized the environment. He did that years ago, in fact. That's all I can do. Not his words, of course, but he understands them. He is intimately acquainted with his limitations. Why the narrator is thinking of England? - Because of the snow - Because of the sun - Because of the rain - not enough information
**Answer**
Because of the rain