Given the Question and Answer pair, detect whether the answer is acceptable or not. Denote acceptable answer as "yes", otherwise denote as "no". An acceptable answer is consistent with the context in question, detailed, long, and uses general knowledge of English. Answers that are not definite and suggest a variety of options are not acceptable answers.

Question: The nuns in the 1965 movie "The Sound of Music" are singing about Maria, who is difficult to deal with: How do you solve a problem like Maria? Being non-native (and only seeing a still frame of the scene) I thought it meant "How does Maria solve problems?". Somewhat similar to "What would Jesus do?". Can "solve a problem like [someone]" also be understood in this way? Edits: I am aware of the context. It would be silly to think the singing nuns hold up Maria (Julie Andrews) as a role model. I checked my Quirk/Greenbaum grammar but have trouble finding anything conclusive concerning this usage of [like] and its validity. I do have to admit, that I didn't look very thoroughly. I am a bit like Maria, in this way.
Answer: You're right: "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" is syntactically ambiguous. The phrase "like Maria" can modify either a preceding noun phrase ("a problem") or a preceding verb phrase ("solve a problem"). Both of these usages are recognized as valid by traditional prescriptive grammars (Fowler 1926 describes "He talks like an expert" as an "unexceptionable" usage of like, where "like is equivalent to a prepositional adverb"p. 325 in republished 2009 edition). Prescriptive grammars have traditionally condemned a third use of like, the use "as a conjunction" where it is followed by a clause (e.g. "like Maria does") rather than by a noun phrase. However, as the comments point out, that construction would allow you to express "How do you solve problems the way that Maria solves problems" without ambiguity. Many modern linguists analyze like as a preposition when it takes a bare noun phrase like "Maria" as its complement (although like is not always a preposition, and even when it is, it doesn't always behave exactly the same way as other prepositions). The same kind of ambiguity is seen with many prepositional phrases, as illustrated by the joke "One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know," which relies on this ambiguity. You can see further examples and discussion in the answers to Does "I am eating vegan cheese in my underpants" really imply that the vegan cheese is inside my underpants? (the "shot an elephant in my pajamas" joke is mentioned in JoeTaxpayer's answer there).
yes