John Stuart Mill Bicentennial Open
May 20, 2006
Packet #1
Toss-Up Questions
1. In one of this man’s works a woman named Flora promises to protect a man named Carlos who killed Licio in a duel, which poses a problem because Licio was engaged to marry Flora. In another of his works, the governor of Gaeta is horrified to learn that the daughter of Alonso Colona has run away with a murderer named César Ursino. In addition to the paired It Is Better Than It Was and It Is Worse Than It Was, he wrote about the death of Prince Ferdinand in The Constant Prince, while his morality plays include The Faithful Shepherd. However, he’s best known today for secular works like The Mayor of Zalamea. FTP, name this dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age who wrote Life Is a Dream.
ANSWER: Pedro Calderon de la Barca
2. He was said to have had affairs with Lady Jersey, Lady Cowper, and Princess Lieven, the three principal hostesses of Almack’s Club, and his amorous nature led to his nickname of “Lord Cupid.” While still an undergraduate, he ran for the Parliamentary seat opened by the death of William Pitt. He became known as “Lord Pumice Stone” during his time as Foreign Secretary, and he used the pretext of the Don Pacifico affair to organize an attack on Greece. After the fall of the Earl of Aberdeen’s government, he began his first stint as Prime Minister. FTP, name this British politician whose second term as Prime Minister co-incided with the American Civil War.
ANSWER: Henry John Temple or 3rd Viscount Palmerston (accept either)
3. They are characterized by the presence of tegument between the envelope and their icosahedral capsid. The state that gives them their name features a circular genome, while their genome typically exists as double-stranded DNA. The thymidine kinase encoded by that genome is the target of gancyclovir and acyclovir. One member of this group causes "sixth disease," while type 8 is associated with Kaposi's sarcoma and another type is associated with Burkitt's lymphoma. Varicella zoster and Epstein-Barr are both members of, FTP, this family of viruses capable of latent infection, the causative agents of shingles, infectious mononucleosis, cold sores, and sporadic anxiety for Paul Litvak.
ANSWER: herpes viruses or Herpesviridae
4. He depicted his sister, Mrs. Violet Ormond, in such paintings as A Gust of Wind and A Morning Walk. His early works include an 1879 portrait of Carolus-Duran, with whom he studied. After striking out in Paris he moved to London, where his study of three seated young women, The Misses Vickers, was widely panned. He gained more praise for his painting of two little girls lighting Japanese lanterns, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, though he is best known today for a painting shown at the Salon of 1884. FTP, name this American artist who depicted the wife of Pierre Gautreau in a slinky black dress in his Madame X.
ANSWER: John Singer Sargent
5. As a youth the title character wrote a play called Let Freedom Ring! whose main characters are named Prejudice and Tolerance. The protagonist’s former girlfriend was once married to a man who would pay black women to shit on a glass table while he masturbated beneath it. That girlfriend is abandoned by him in Greece after he has a threesome with her and a prostitute named Lina in Rome. The protagonist has had affairs with women he calls “The Pumpkin” and “The Pilgrim” in addition to “The Monkey,” but is impotent with two women when he visits Israel at the end of the novel. FTP, name this book about a man who tells his life story to Dr. Spielvogel, written by Philip Roth.
ANSWER: Portnoy’s Complaint
6. This book concludes with two chapters on the “three rules of inheritance” that show the growth of the idea of property. A previous part considers the Punaluan, Syndyasmian, and Monogamian as some of the “successive forms of the family,” while the Ganowanians, Aztecs, and Romans are among the groups considered in the longest part, which considers the idea of government. The author uses the word “gentes” to describe groups which he called “tribes” in such books as League of the Iroquois and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. FTP, name this 1877 book about the “lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization,” the magnum opus of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan.
ANSWER: Ancient Society
7. This country suffered from a 4-year civil war known as the Revolution of the Lances which ended with a peace agreement establishing the political principle of coparticipation. Its indigenous population of Charrúa Indians was nearly wiped out in an 1831 massacre led by its first president, General Fructuosa Rivera. Its struggle for independence saw an early success at Las Piedras by troops under its national hero, José Artigas. A Brazilian intervention replaced Atanásio Aguirre with Venancio Flores, the leader of the Colorado party, a power shift that led to the War of the Triple Alliance, in which this country allied with Brazil and Argentina to beat up on Paraguay. FTP, name this country whose capital, located on the Río de la Plata across from Buenos Aires, is Montevideo.
ANSWER: Uruguay
8. One version of Schur’s lemma states that, for a module of this type, the endomorphism ring is a division ring. For a given significance level, the Neyman-Pearson lemma states that the likelihood ratio is the most powerful test between two hypotheses of this type; such hypotheses fully specify the probability distribution. This term is applied to any function with a finite range, and to groups which have no nontrivial proper normal subgroups. This term also denotes poles of order one, and graphs with no multiple edges or loops. FTP, name this adjective applied to such machines as the inclined plane and lever, as well as a type of harmonic motion.
ANSWER: simple
9. One character in this work refuses to make a purchase because he doesn’t want to “be on the Discovery Channel.” It features a brief appearance from Daniel Dae Kim of Lost, who apparently is involved in slave trafficking. One character is killed while attempting to show an icon of Saint Christopher to another character, while someone else fails to commit a murder because his daughter bought him blanks for his gun. A policeman we thought was a jerk turns out to have an elderly father suffering from prostate cancer, while a policeman we thought was nice kills a hitchhiker. Featuring Brendan Fraser as a district attorney, Matt Dillon as a cop, and Don Cheadle as another cop, this is, FTP, what recent film set in Los Angeles which won a Best Picture Oscar?
ANSWER: Crash
10. In his Refutation of All Heresies, Hippolytus argued that the followers of Noetus were not disciples of Christ but of this man. Diogenes Laertius noted that this man claimed that both Archilochus and Homer deserved to be thrown out of the games and flogged, and claimed that after this man’s friend Hermodorus was thrown out of their city he retired to a temple and played dice with children. This man claimed that a “dry soul is wisest,” and argued that for souls it is death to become water. More famously, he claimed that “eternity is a child at play,” that “war is father of all,” and that the world will be destroyed by fire. FTP, name this pre-Socratic thinker who was nicknamed “the Obscure,” who also said that you can never step into the same river twice.
ANSWER: Heraclitus
11. Early d-block metals tend to interact with ligands that donate electrons from these orbitals, while late d-block metals interact with ligands that can accept electrons into the antibonding type of these orbitals in a phenomenon known as backbonding. It interacts with alkali metals in an interaction that works because of a molecular quadrupole. The complex given this name, also known as the encounter complex, forms before the Wheland intermediate in electrophilic aromatic substitution reactions; in another reaction intermediate, it interacts with boron in a hydroboration reaction. Electrons in an aromatic system are considered to exist in a delocalized type of this orbital that possesses a nodal plane along the axis containing the bonded nuclei. FTP identify this type of orbital often formed between two parallel p orbitals.
ANSWER: pi orbital
12. A play about this character includes scenes at the House of Laughter and in Athens, and ends with a woman named Pompeia throwing herself into a fire. This man’s life is the subject of Robert Browning’s poem “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.” According to medieval legend, this figure was the first bishop of Larnaca, and he was also identified as the brother of Martha and Mary Magdalene, perhaps because he was also a native of Bethany. FTP, name this character who “laughed” in a play by Eugene O’Neill and in the New Testament was resurrected from the dead.
ANSWER: Lazarus (accept Lazarus Laughed on the first sentence)
13. Shortly after it took place this event was investigated by a commission headed by William Sampson, whose conclusions were confirmed 13 years later by a commission headed by Charles Vreeland. Those findings were tentatively endorsed by a 1999 investigation sponsored by National Geographic, which took issue with an earlier investigation launched by Hyman Rickover. The latter investigation suggested that a coal bunker fire was responsible for this event, which affected a vessel commanded by Charles Sigsbee. It took place on the night of February 15, and led to over 250 deaths. FTP, name this event which occurred in 1898 in Havana Harbor and led to the Spanish-American War.
ANSWER: the sinking of the USS Maine (accept equivalents)
14. A naïve treatment of the gravitational version of this effect can be used with the normal formula for gravitational redshift to derive the factor of one-third in the Sachs-Wolfe effect. This effect also results in Thomas precession. One experiment verified it with tunable dye lasers using a two photon transition in neon to eliminate the first-order Doppler shift, and measured the beat frequency. This effect can also be used by an Earth-based observer to explain the flux of muons. The twin paradox involves, FTP, what relativistic phenomenon tested in the Hafele-Keating experiment, in which commercial airplanes flew around with cesium clocks?
ANSWER: time dilation
15. In the foreword to this work, the author claims to have enjoyed an excellent zabaione from the Caffe Pedrocchi with the Canon’s nephew, who gave him a journal which inspired the story. In the final pages of this work, we learn that Ernesto V was adored by his subjects, while the death of the young Sandrino led to the death of his mother Clélia, which led to the protagonist’s retirement to the title location. That protagonist is imprisoned for nine months in the Farnese Tower, and associates with Count Mosca and the Duchess Sanseverina. FTP, name this novel about Fabrizio del Dongo, a work by Stendhal named for an Italian building.
ANSWER: The Charterhouse of Parma or Chartreuse de Parme
16. At the beginning of this work the people sing “Feste e pane” while a spy looks on scornfully, after which the title character’s mother sings “Figlia, che reggi il tremulo pie.” That spy later persuades Zuane that the title character’s mother is a witch, after which the title character’s beloved gets his sailors to help in saving the blind La Cieca. The third act is called “The House of Gold,” and is set in the house of Alvise Badoero, who holds a party at which the chorus sings “D’un vampiro fatal l’ala fredda passo” following this opera’s most famous episode, a ballet which represents several times of day. FTP, name this opera set in Venice in the 17th century, a work featuring “The Dance of the Hours” which was written by Amilcare Ponchielli.
ANSWER: La Gioconda
17. In one branch of the Mabinogion, one of these items smeared with poison is used to kill a character sometimes known as “Pierced-Thighs.” In Greek myth, scrapings from one of these items were used to heal Telephus, and in Japanese myth, Izanagi and Izanami created the first island using a jeweled one known as Amenonuhoko. Other mythical examples include Rhongomiant, one whose name meant “swaying one,” and the Gae Bolga of Cuchulainn. One of these was thrown overhead to signal the start of the war of the Aesir and Vanir, and Achilles used one of these weapons to kill Hector. FTP, name this type of weapon, exemplified by Odin’s Gungnir.
ANSWER: spears
18. They may be processed or degraded in P bodies. In eukaryotes, their synthesis is inhibited by amanitin, and their sequence may include SECIS [se-sis] or IRES [i-res] elements. Synthesis may terminate by formation of a hairpin structure or with the aid of rho factor. Their modifications may be directed by guide RNA's, and includes the addition of two methyl groups to a specific nucleotide. In prokaryotes, they contain the Shine-Dalgarno sequence and are often polycistronic. FTP identify this molecule that is modified in eukaryotes with a cap of 7-methylguanosine and a poly(A) tail, the type of RNA that serves as the template for protein synthesis.
ANSWER: messenger RNAs
19. It is parodied in a poem by L. E. Sissman in which he speaks of being in Foyles bookstore and finding a copy of his book Dying: An Introduction on the remainders table. It is alluded to in the final stanza of Anthony Hecht’s poem “The Mysteries of Caesar,” in which a Latin teacher is said to be fond of boys who are “as Antinous to that inward eye / Which is the pitiless bliss of solitude.” In the fourth and final stanza of this poem, the speaker’s “heart with pleasure fills” as he lies on his couch in “vacant or in pensive mood” and thinks of a scene described in the opening three stanzas. FTP, name this poem which features a “jocund company” of at least “ten thousand” daffodils, a work by William Wordsworth in which the poet compares himself to something that floats in the sky.