This task is about writing a correct answer for the reading comprehension task. Based on the information provided in a given passage, you should identify the shortest continuous text span from the passage that serves as an answer to the given question. Avoid answers that are incorrect or provides incomplete justification for the question.

[EX Q]: Passage: The U.S. Navy, by contrast, relied on commerce raiding from the outset. However, the problem of Allied forces surrounded in the Philippines, during the early part of 1942, led to diversion of boats to "guerrilla submarine" missions. As well, basing in Australia placed boats under Japanese aerial threat while en route to patrol areas, reducing their effectiveness, and Nimitz relied on submarines for close surveillance of enemy bases. Furthermore, the standard-issue Mark 14 torpedo and its Mark VI exploder both proved defective, problems which were not corrected until September 1943. Worst of all, before the war, an uninformed US Customs officer had seized a copy of the Japanese merchant marine code (called the "maru code" in the USN), not knowing that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had broken it. The Japanese promptly changed it, and the new code was not broken again by OP-20G until 1943. Question: What was the "maru code"?
[EX A]: Japanese merchant marine code

[EX Q]: Passage: The following four timelines show the geologic time scale. The first shows the entire time from the formation of the Earth to the present, but this compresses the most recent eon. Therefore, the second scale shows the most recent eon with an expanded scale. The second scale compresses the most recent era, so the most recent era is expanded in the third scale. Since the Quaternary is a very short period with short epochs, it is further expanded in the fourth scale. The second, third, and fourth timelines are therefore each subsections of their preceding timeline as indicated by asterisks. The Holocene (the latest epoch) is too small to be shown clearly on the third timeline on the right, another reason for expanding the fourth scale. The Pleistocene (P) epoch. Q stands for the Quaternary period. Question: What is the name of the latest epoch?
[EX A]: Holocene

[EX Q]: Passage: Murdoch has responded to some of the arguments against the newspaper by saying that critics are "snobs" who want to "impose their tastes on everyone else", while MacKenzie claims the same critics are people who, if they ever had a "popular idea", would have to "go and lie down in a dark room for half an hour". Both have pointed to the huge commercial success of the Sun in this period and its establishment as Britain's top-selling newspaper, claiming that they are "giving the public what they want". This conclusion is disputed by critics. John Pilger has said that a late-1970s edition of the Daily Mirror, which replaced the usual celebrity and domestic political news items with an entire issue devoted to his own front-line reporting of the genocide in Pol Pot's Cambodia, not only outsold The Sun on the day it was issued but became the only edition of the Daily Mirror to ever sell every single copy issued throughout the country, something never achieved by The Sun. Question: What did Murdoch and Mackenzie say in defense of The Sun?
[EX A]:
they are "giving the public what they want"