TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you will be shown an extract from a movie plot and a question. You need to provide the correct answer for it. Short answers containing words that are present in the passage are preferred.
PROBLEM: Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a respected child psychologist. His wife, Jenny (Lolita Davidovich), becomes concerned that Carter is obsessively studying their daughter, Amy; he regards her like a scientist tracking the development of his creation. But Carter himself suffers from multiple personality disorder consisting of Cain, a street hustler, Josh, a shy 10-year-old boy, and Margo, a middle-aged nanny. Carter and Cain are killing young mothers to procure their children for his experiments.Jenny is having an affair with Jack Dante (Steven Bauer), the widower of a former patient. She had a relationship with him years ago, but he left her. Now she plans to leave Carter and elope with him. When Carter accidentally discovers their tryst, he descends completely into his madness and begins leaving subtle clues for the police that Jack is the real killer. Next, he attempts to kill Jenny by submerging her car in a lake. She escapes and confronts Carter at home. Unable to find Amy, Jenny demands Carter tell her where she is. Carter replies that she is with his father, whom Jenny knows has been dead for years.Carter is apprehended for attempted murder. The police bring Dr. Lynn Waldheim (Frances Sternhagen) to interrogate him. Waldheim interviews Carter and informs the police that she co-wrote a book with Nix Sr. called Raising Cain, about a boy with multiple personality disorder. Nix Sr. had extensive detailed knowledge of Cain's tortured childhood, including taped recordings of their sessions. However, Waldheim was never allowed to meet Cain. She pieced the situation together: Nix Sr. dispassionately put his own son through years of severe child abuse to gain firsthand accounts of his traumatic psychological development and study the emerging personalities. Horrified, Waldheim quit the project.During interrogation, Margo and Josh act and speak for Carter. Josh recites a rhyme and vanishes, and Margo assumes control. She stonewalls Waldheim from any further questioning. Eventually, Carter and Cain break from their confines. They pounce upon Dr. Waldheim, knocking her unconscious and leaving the building disguised as her. The police soon find Waldheim begging them to arrest Carter before any children are harmed.Nix Sr. (Lithgow) is in fact alive, having faked his own death to elude prosecution for attempting to buy babies. He has established a new identity and a clandestine research facility in Norway. He has been using Carter and his multiples to procure the children so he will have an adequate control group to study the development of MPD. Jenny follows who she thinks is Waldheim to a motel, but it is actually Carter/Cain. She follows Carter/Cain, who is now Margo, into an elevator. When it opens, she sees Nix Sr. with her daughter Amy. While Jenny begs for Nix Sr. to give back her daughter, Carter, Cain and Margo stabs "their" father from behind. Jack arrives with the police, and Carter and his personalities disappear.The movie ends with Jenny and Amy in a park. Amy runs off into the woods calling "Daddy, Daddy". Jenny follows her and finds Amy, who says her father has gone away. When Jenny bends down to pick Amy up, Carter appears behind her in a wig and a dress; Margo is now in control. Jenny holds Amy in her arms, oblivious to who is behind her., Question: How did Nix Sr. obtain information about Cain's childhood?

SOLUTION: Answer: Tape recordings

PROBLEM: Corbett stars as Matt Andrews, a geologist who is asked to investigate why there have been two large sinkholes affecting the city of New Orleans. Jessica Steen plays his girlfriend Allison Beauchamp, assistant to the Mayor, who has to decide whether the problems with the sinkholes will spread far enough to require that the remainder of Mardi Gras be cancelled, which would be an economic disaster to the city.Matt has a number of personal issues because of a disaster which happened at a mine he was advising on its operations. Although cleared of responsibility for the accident, he still blames himself, which may be causing him to be overcautious. Matt admits the potential problem of the sinkholes becoming so serious as to endanger the city could occur next week, or not for three hundred years. Based on the lack of real evidence of immediate danger, and because some evidence that she should have received has been destroyed by the mayor's political flack, Allison has decided not to close the festival, only to have the disaster metastasize, like a cancer devouring the city's underground.The only answer is to obtain a binary liquid which when combined produces a foam that will fill the huge sinkhole cavern. The foam will expand to hundreds of times its size, and becomes as hard as concrete. Due to an emergency, while Matt is underground inspecting the caverns, he becomes partially trapped, and has to ask to have the foam started (which will kill him if he can't find an escape) because if they don't start the flow of the liquid immediately, the ground underneath downtown New Orleans will collapse similar to the effects of soil liquefaction and thousands to tens of thousands of people will be injured or killed. The last few minutes of the film become a race against time as Matt attempts to find an exit before the foam overwhelms him.The film points to an event that would happen five years after the movie was made. Matt points out the sinkholes, if they do fail and open up, could be as serious a disaster to the city as if its levees collapsed, an event that did happen as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005., Question: What city does the movie take place in?

SOLUTION: Answer: New Orleans

PROBLEM: In the desert region of San Angelo, California, geologist Ben Gilbert brings a strange black rock back to his office, where he and bored local reporter Martin Cochrane examine it but fail to determine its origin. That night, a strong wind blows a bottle of water over onto the rock, which begins to bubble and smolder.The next day, the head of the geological office, Dave Miller, returns to town from a business trip and finds the office destroyed by a huge growth of black rock and Ben dead, in a rock-hard, apparently petrified state. Meanwhile, Dave's girl friend, schoolteacher Cathy Barrett, brings her students to the desert, where little Ginny Simpson pockets a piece of the black rock, later washing it in a basin outside her parents' farm. In town, Doctor Reynolds performs an autopsy on Ben, but when he cannot explain Ben's rigidity, he informs Dave and Police Chief Dan Corey that he is shipping the body to a specialist. Martin returns to the demolished office with Dave, and there recognizes the rock formations as resembling the piece of black rock Ben had been examining.Cathy joins them and, also recognizing the rock, races with the men to the Simpson farm. They find it in ruins under a pile of black rock, and Ginny's parents dead. The girl, however, is in a catatonic state, and they rush her to the care of specialist Dr. Steve Hendricks, at the California Medical Research Center. He soon reports that she is slowly turning to stone, and posits that her only hope of survival lies with identifying the black rock within the next eight hours. Dave brings the rock to his old professor, Arthur Flanders, who assumes that it is from a meteor. Together they visit the Simpson farm, where Arthur notices a discoloration in the ground and deduces that the rock is draining silicon from whatever it touches, including humans.They then go to the desert, where they trace fragments of the rock to a huge meteor. Fretting that the meteor contains billions of years worth of space secrets, which they have only hours to discover, Dave sends the new information to Steve, who prepares a synthetic silicon solution and injects it into Ginny. While a storm brews outside, Dave and Arthur continue to investigate what causes the rock to grow, and after a piece of rock falls into the sink and begins to bubble, they realize that water is the culprit. Noticing the rain, they drive to the desert, where the small pieces of rock are mixing with water to form huge monoliths that rise from the earth and then crash into hundreds of pieces, each becoming another monolith.They report their findings to Dan, who plans to evacuate the town, even though the weather bureau reports that the rain will soon stop. At the hospital, Ginny finally stirs, and Dave deduces that Steve's silicon solution can be used to control the rocks. Soon, however, more locals are rushed to hospital in the throes of the petrification process, and the rock continues to grow. With little time to announce their findings to the town, Dave and Dan turn to Martin to round up the paperboys and spread the word. The governor soon declares a state of emergency, and Dave and Arthur struggle to convert the formula to one that will retard the rock growth, failing until they realize that the key lies in the simple saline solution Steve used on Ginny.While casualties mount, Dave figures out a way to dynamite the local dam and flood the nearby salt flats, thus creating a large supply of salty water near the canyon edge. Knowing that they must halt the rock's growth at the canyon edge or lose all hope of survival, Dave ignores the governor's refusal to give permission to the risky project, and sets up dynamite stations around the dam. Arthur doubts that the water will be able to absorb enough salt for the plan to work, but Martin cites hopeful statistics he has learned from years of reporting on the salt flats, and the team is cheered by his certainty. With only minutes left until the monoliths reach the canyon edge, Dan orders the dynamite to be detonated, and the group watches in fear as the water flows over the monoliths. The plan at first seems to fail, but finally the rock growth slows, and Dan holds Cathy as the last huge formation crashes to a standstill., Question: Gilbert is a geologist in what state?

SOLUTION:
Answer: California