TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.
PROBLEM: Passage: British couple Nigel and Fiona Dobson are on a Mediterranean cruise ship to Istanbul en route to India. They encounter a beautiful French woman, Mimi, and that night Nigel meets her while dancing alone in the ship's bar. Later Nigel meets her much older and disabled American husband Oscar, who is acerbic and cynical, having been jaded and a failure as a writer.
Oscar invites Nigel to his cabin where he tells Nigel in great detail how he and Mimi first met on a bus in Paris and fell passionately in love. Nigel relates all to Fiona. Both are appalled by Oscar's exhibitionism, but Nigel is also fascinated by Mimi, who provokes him. Later, Oscar narrates how they explored bondage, sadomasochism, and voyeurism. As a contrast to their sexual adventurousness, we see Nigel and Fiona meeting a distinguished Indian gentleman, Mr. Singh, who is traveling with his little daughter Amrita.
Invited by Mimi, Nigel, escaping from a bridge game, goes to meet her in her cabin, but it turns out she and Oscar have played a joke on him. Nigel wants to leave, but another session unfolds, with Oscar describing how their hate/love relationship developed. Bored, he tried to break up, but Mimi begged him to let her live with him under any conditions. He complied, but started to explore sadistic fantasies at her expense, humiliating her in public. When Mimi became pregnant, he made her have an abortion, saying that he would be a terrible father. When he visited her in hospital, he was shocked by her condition and almost relented in his attempts to drive her away. He promised her a holiday in the Caribbean, but he got off the plane just before take off. Mimi departed alone, crying.

SOLUTION: Which person got Mimi pregnant?

PROBLEM: Passage: From her Parkville jail cell, Vergie Winters watches the funeral procession of Senator John Shadwell and remembers her twenty-year past with him: The moment young lawyer John returns to Parkville from an extended honeymoon with his social climbing wife Laura, he visits Vergie, his former lover. After a passionate embrace, John explains to the youthful milliner that he had abandoned their romance because Vergie's father had told him that she was pregnant by laborer Hugo McQueen and would be forced to marry. Vergie then tells John that, to keep her from marrying John, Laura's father had paid her father $10,000 to tell him that devastating lie.
Still deeply in love, John and Vergie continue to see each other, but when John starts to campaign for Congress, Preston, a political boss, informs Vergie that, if John is to receive his vital support, she must forego their affair. Although Vergie agrees to Preston's terms, John refuses to end the relationship and spends a long evening with her before the election.
After a victorious win, John moves to Washington, D.C. with Laura, Vergie bears his child under an assumed name. John then adopts the baby, named Joan, whom he claims is the child of a destitute family friend.
At the start of World War I, John returns to Parkville and once again resumes his affair with Vergie. When one of John's late night rendezvous is witnessed by a town gossip and reported to Mike Davey, John's only political enemy, Vergie's successful millinery shop is boycotted, and she is shunned by all but the local prostitutes. In addition, Davey hires Preston's son Barry to steal from Preston's home safe a page from a hotel register on which Vergie had written her assumed name. As Barry is breaking into his father's safe, however, Preston mistakes him for a burglar and kills him, but tells his butler that a burglar shot his son.

SOLUTION: What is the full name of the person who visits their former lover?

PROBLEM: Passage: Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step toward Shostakovich's rehabilitation as a creative artist, which was marked by his Tenth Symphony. It features a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs, Elmira Nazirova being a pianist and composer who had studied under Shostakovich in the year before his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatory), the meaning of which is still debated, while the savage second movement, according to Testimony, is intended as a musical portrait of Stalin. The Tenth ranks alongside the Fifth and Seventh as one of Shostakovich's most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.
During the forties and fifties, Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils, Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich's first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954. He taught Ustvolskaya from 1937 to 1947. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as "tender". Ustvolskaya rejected a proposal of marriage from him after Nina's death. Shostakovich's daughter, Galina, recalled her father consulting her and Maxim about the possibility of Ustvolskaya becoming their stepmother. Ustvolskaya's friend Viktor Suslin said that she had been "deeply disappointed" in Shostakovich by the time of her graduation in 1947. The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely through his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced three years later.
In 1954, Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture, opus 96; it was used as the theme music for the 1980 Summer Olympics. (His '"Theme from the film Pirogov, Opus 76a: Finale" was played as the cauldron was lit at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.)
In 1959, Shostakovich appeared on stage in Moscow at the end of a concert performance of his Fifth Symphony, congratulating Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for their performance (part of a concert tour of the Soviet Union). Later that year, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the symphony in Boston for Columbia Records.

SOLUTION:
What is the last name of the person whose rehabilitation was marked by his Tenth Symphony?