ACF Regionals 2008: Ecstasy and Fire
Tossups by Yale A (Michael Bilow, Benjamin Colman, Wen Yu Ho, Aaron Sin, Andrew Uzzell)
1. This artist depicted the remnants of a tree hanging over the edge of a cliff after a lightning strike in Storm in the Mountains, and he showed a man walking toward the titular structure high on a cliff in The Monastery of San Pedro. His former home Olana is now a tourist site, and no single place inspired the setting of Twilight in the Wilderness. Various trips led to many of his works, includingThe Icebergs and Falls of Tequendama, as well as images of the volcanos Chimborozo and Cotopaxi. For ten points, name this student of Thomas Cole who painted a famous version of some New York falls in Niagara and an idealized South American landscape inHeart of the Andes.
ANSWER: Frederick Edwin Church
2. The pastor Marius Byleveld attempts to get sculptress Helen Martins to move to a retirement home in a play by this author, who also wrote a drama in which Shark, the leader of the tsotsis, is lectured by Father Higgins. Another of his plays takes place as the two biracial title characters wander near a river following their expulsion from town in a sweep by white supremacists. Another of his titles refers to the invisible link between Morris and Zachariah Pietersen, and he also wrote about Sam and Willie's return to subservience at the hands of an insecure white teenager. For 10 points, name this author of No-Good Friday, The Blood Knot, and Master Harold and the Boys.
ANSWER: Athol Fugard
3. Formed in response to the battle of Newburn, its actions led to the revival of the Commissions of Array. It executed Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Stafford by bills of attainder and passed a list of alleged misdeeds known as the Grand Remonstrance. Its Speaker was William Lenthall, who responded, “I see the birds have flown” when five of its members were accused of treason. It was initially dominated by John Pym. Convened in order to raise money for the Second Bishops’ War, 121 of its members were expelled in Pride’s Purge. For 10 points, name this English body that preceded the Rump Parliament.
ANSWER:Long Parliament
4. One character known by this sobriquet claims to have locked the Allmuseri gods in a crate. He is a dwarf who issues a loyalty oath after his secret trove of African artifacts is discovered on the Republic by Rutherford Johnson, who is stowing away on an outlaw slave ship commanded by this man in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage. Another character by this name has a son who appears in Maximum Velocity and a clone named Blood; that man defeated Dr. Stewart, Pico, and Samurai Goroh in his debut race. He can perform the Raptor Boost or a powerful namesake punch in Super Smash Brothers. For 10 points, name this driver of a blue hovercar in the F-Zero series.
ANSWER:Captain Falcon
5. The first extrasolar planet to be definitively confirmed was found orbiting one of these objects by Alexander Wolszczan. One subclass of them is also known as the "recycled" type, and the Hulse-Taylor binary one provided the first observational evidence of gravity waves. Roche lobe overflow leads to the accretion-powered ones that emit x-rays, while the decay of a strong magnetic field powers the magnetar class. Glitches can occur in the originally discovered type of these objects, whose misalignment of rotation and magnetic axes is responsible for their most prominent feature. For 10 points, name these rotating neutron stars that regularly emit radiation.
ANSWER: pulsars
6. This work was originally meant to be called simply Program Symphony, but the composer wanted the program to remain secret. The first movement features a trombone passage based on the Orthodox Hymn, while earlier the main motif of a descending second is introduced in the bassoon, which later is asked to play at a volume marked with six p's. The second movement is in five-four time, while the ending of the third movement is sometimes mistaken for the end of the piece, as the non-traditional final movement of this B minor work is slow and quiet. For 10 points, identify this final work of Tchaikovsky, commonly known asPathetique.
ANSWER: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 [accept Pathetique before it is read]
7. One of this author's characters is ordered killed by "Joe the Egg." Another character has flings with both a woman nicknamed "Mau Mau" and Arthur Lecomte. In addition to a novel about the sexually confused Art Beckstein, this author wrote an alternate history about the Federal District of Sitka, where Berko Shemets and Meyer Landsman work in a Jewish homeland that was set up in Alaska after the immediate collapse of Israel in 1948. In another of his novels, a title character is called before Congress to testify about sexual innuendo in The Escapist. For 10 points, name this author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
ANSWER: Michael Chabon
8. Elizabeth Peters extended this man's most notable result in a study of divorce rates across states, which found that the ease of getting divorced has no effect on the prevalence of divorce. His eponymous conjecture states that monopolists attempting to use price discrimination must eventually offer a low price to their consumers, but he is more famous for being the architect of the sale of the electromagnetic spectrum for use by communications companies. He wrote The Nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Cost. For 10 points, name this economist who stated that a lack of transaction costs will always minimize externalities in his namesake theorem.
ANSWER: Ronald Coase
9. At one point in this novel, the title character finds a note making a seven o'clock appointment at a green bench, where he runs into the man who had earlier tried to murder him in a hotel. The character Ippolit reads aloud from his open letter explaining why he will kill himself the next time the sun rises, and the main character breaks a vase at a party, rejects Agalaya, and is left at the altar by a woman whom he later finds murdered in another man's bed, Nastaya. For 10 points, name this novel about a man who meets Roghozhin on a train while returning from Swiss epilepsy treatments, written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
ANSWER:The Idiot
10. A series of court battles followed this man's refutation of the Bedford Level Experiment, and he refuted Percival Lowell's claims about Martian canals in Is Mars Habitable? His work Tropical Nature focuses largely on warning coloration, and his eponymous effect, also called reinforcement, deals with the discouragement of hybridization leading to reproductive isolation. Weber and Lydekker have improved a construct named for him, which was influenced by sea levels over the Sunda and Sahul shelves. For 10 points, name this naturalist who divided Asiatic and Australian fauna with his line, and who devised evolution by natural selection independently of Darwin.
ANSWER: Alfred Russel Wallace
11. Cleon added a mysterious "diateichisma" to them. Xenophon writes of the girls who played flutes during the first destruction of these things, which were ultimately a casulaty of catapults during the First Mithridatic War An extension of this structure terminated at Phaleron. In 394 BCE, a Persian fleet under Conon helped rebuild this structure, which was originally planned after the battle of Plataea. Though a Spartan army defeated their builders at Tangara during their construction, they were completed in time for Pericles to advise the Athenians to stay behind them. For 10 points name these fortifications, stretching over 6 miles, which connected Athens to the port at Piraeus.
ANSWER:Long Walls
12. The Venezuelan national park by this name is found in the Cordillera de Mérida and contains MirrorPeak. The one in Europe's highest point is at Mulhacen, and has Europe's southernmost ski resort. The one in South America is the world's highest coastal range, and includes Pico Cristobal Colon and Pico Simon Bolivar. The North American range casts a rain shadow on Death Valley, and its high point is Mount Whitney. For 10 points, what name do these mountain ranges share, meaning "snowy mountains" in Spanish?
ANSWER:Sierra Nevada
13. He never wrote a planned forty-page essay called On the Imaginative in Poetry, which was to be the preface to his universally derided reinterpretation of The Winter's Tale entitled Zapolya. One of his poems discusses a "Dark green file of long lank weeds," and he also wrote about "silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon" in "Frost at Midnight." In one of his poems, "slimy things did crawl upon my legs" and the “bloody sun...did stand no higher than the moon” as a result of a rash action taken with a crossbow and described to a wedding-guest. For 10 points, name this author of "Christabel" and "Dejection: An Ode" who wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
ANSWER: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
14. Christian Falsen created one of these in Norway, and Namik Kemal agitated for one of these in the Ottoman Empire, getting his wish during the rule of Abdulhamid II. Another one, known by its supportes as the "sacred codex," appeared in 1812 and is known as the one "of Cadiz" in Spain. Sun Yat-Sen advocated for the "five-power" one in China, Walter Bagehot wrote a book about the mythical English one, and the French National Assembly ordered a "civil" one "of the clergy" passed in 1790. For 10 points, name these documents, whose American version incorporates the Connecticut Compromise and three-fifths compromise and has twenty-seven amendments.
ANSWER:constitutions
15. Two answers needed. The Poncelet-Steiner theorem states that one is unnecessary if you can use the other one,and the Mohr-Mascheroni theorem says one of them is unnecessary. One can be used, along with dividers, to create the Pythagorean extensions of the rationals. Considered in algebraic terms, they can only produce constructible numbers, and as a result one cannot construct every regular polygon with them, nor can one double the volume of a cube with them. One also cannot use them to find a square with the area of a given circle, but with a quadratrix, one can trisect a curve with them.For 10 points, identify these two mechanical devices used in classical Greek geometry.
ANSWERS: straightedgeand compass [prompt on "ruler" for straightedge; accept answers in either order]
16. As a law clerk in 1952, William Rehnquist wrote a memo detailing his support of the decision in this earlier case. It was argued on behalf of the Citizens Committe by Albion Tourgée. Justice David Brewer did not participate, and Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority in this decision, arguing that the “badge of inferiority” assumed by the plaintiff was one he placed onto himself. It was a 7-1 decision, with John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent saying that the "Constitution is color-blind" on behalf of its one-eighth black plaintiff from Louisiana. For 10 points, identify this 1896 Supreme Court case that upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.
ANSWER:Plessy v. Ferguson [accept Ferguson v. Plessy]
17. One of his final works was a grey terra cotta façade for the Krause Music Store, and he created three visibly different zones in his design for the GuarantyBuilding in Buffalo. After his career took a turn for the worse, he designed several banks, one found in Cedar Rapids. He had a noted dispute with Daniel Burnham over the WhiteCity at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which is also home to his AuditoriumBuilding for RooseveltUniversity and the Carson Pirie Scott department store. For 10 points, name this long-time partner of Dankmar Adler who designed one of the first skyscrapers in St. Louis, the WainwrightBuilding, and who said "form follows function."
ANSWER: Louis Sullivan
18. This quantity can be calculated for water with the Arden Buck equation, which is a recent improvement over the Goff-Gratch equation. Thermogravimetry can be used to calculate this value for solids, and it is related to the molar volume, surface tension, and droplet radius in the Kelvin equation. Another equation relates two values of this quantity to the enthalpy of vaporization and temperature, and is named for Clausius and Clayperon, while this value is modified by mole fractions of species in solution in Raoult's Law. For 10 points, name this measure of a liquid's tendency to evaporate, which, when it exceeds atmospheric pressure, results in boiling.
ANSWER: vapor pressure
19. In the Shariputra Sutra, the Buddha tells a tale about impersonating Goldenglow, the king of these animals. This animal symbolizes the female bodhisattva Janguli, and its tail is found on the Chinese creature Feng-huang. One god who takes this form moved two halves of a white pearl around the universe and lived among the men of Lâlish for a time; that is Melek Taus, the central figure of the Yazidi religion. Karttikeya rides one into battle, and, in Greek myth, its appearance was caused by the rescue of Io by Hermes, and the subsequent dispersal of the hundred eyes of Argus onto it. For 10 points, name this bird which symbolize Hera using some large and multicolored plumage.
ANSWER:peacocks
20. One character in this work offers to trade all the wealth of Tantalus for the ability to keep arguments fixed, before quoting a hymn to Zeus by Stasinus. It says that the "art" of proper behavior is comparable to tending animals, and it includes the notion that a carried thing is called “carried” only because someone carries it, and its central concept is at one point compared to justice. Its title character, who agrees to help defend against Meletus’s accusations, wants to charge his father with murdering a servant. For 10 points, name this Socratic dialogue which asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious or is pious because it is loved by the gods.
ANSWER:Euthyphro
Tiebreaker Tossup
21. The calculation of this quantity for various substances was the original driving force for Nicholas Metropolis and Stanislaw Ulam to develop Monte Carlo models, as the relevant dimensions encountered limit the usefulness of a continuum approach. It can be reduced with the use of a beryllium reflector, while mean free path and radiative capture effects make it inversely proportional to density. Although some applications require the "prompt" version of this quantity, others use moderation to ensure that delayed neutrons are also needed to reach it. For 10 points, name this smallest amount of material needed to sustain a fissile nuclear reaction.
ANSWER: critical mass
ACF Regionals 2008: Ecstasy and Fire
Bonuses by Yale A (Michael Bilow, Benjamin Colman, Wen Yu Ho, Aaron Sin, Andrew Uzzell)
1. Name these people who worked in semiotics, for 10 points each.
[10] Sometimes called the founder of semiotics, this author of "The Fixation of Belief," and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" also influenced pragmatism and wrote The New Elements of Mathematics.
ANSWER: Charles Sanders Peirce
[10] This person likes to talk about how semiotics is "anti-humanism" and cannot apply to the "transcendental ego" in such works as Powers of Horror, Desire in Language, and Black Sun.
ANSWER: Julia Kristeva
[10] This Italian's social science works include The Role of the Reader, The Limits of Interpretation, and A Theory of Semiotics.
ANSWER: Umberto Eco
2. Name these Russian cities, for 10 points each.
[10] Renamed during the Soviet period for Maxim Gorky, this city at the confluence of the Oka and Volga was home to a key trade fair and is the home to LobachevksyStateUniversity. Go, fighting non-Euclideans!
ANSWER: Nizhny Novgorod
[10] With a name meaning "ruler of the east," this center of the Primorsky territory overlooks Golden HornBay near the Sea of Japan and is the center of Russia's eastward-looking military and trade activities.
ANSWER: Vladivostok
[10] Straddling the KamaRiver near the Chusovaya, this city is the namesake of a geologic period and spent seventeen years known as Molotov.
ANSWER: Perm
3. Answer these questions about essayists of the twentieth century, for 10 points each.
[10] “Down at the Cross”, the second part of this African American author’s The Fire Next Time, critiques both the Christian churches and the the Nation of Islam. He also wrote Go TellIt on the Mountain.
ANSWER: James Baldwin
[10] Octavio Paz analyzed Mexican history in this collection, which included “The Conquest and Colonialism” and “From Independence to the Revolution.”
ANSWER: The Labyrinth of Solitude [or El Laberinto de la soledad]
[10] This Uruguayan wrote the influential modernismo essay Ariel, in which the narrator Prospero cautions against North American utilitarianism, which is symbolized by Caliban.