HARVARD FALL TOURNAMENT 2006
ROUND THREE
TOSSUPS
1. The title character’s name was a reference to Europe’s second largest lake. This novel was studied obsessively by Nabokov and this book was written serially like many other 19th century novels, but its unusual verses of iambic tetrameter were so unique that a certain type of poetic stanza was named for the title character. The narrator assures us that the title character is a fop whose “play was love,” a remark which does not explain his almost noble refusal of Tanya’s francophone advances. It is ironic that the author died in a duel to defend the honor of his wife, Natalya Goncharova, since the title character of this novel kills his best friend Vladimir Lensky in a duel under similar circumstances. FTP, identify this novel in verse, written by Alexsandr Pushkin.
ANSWER: Eugene Onegin (accept Yvgeny Onyegin)
2. Its companion case, Bolling v. Sharpe, applied a similar rule to the District of Columbia, using the Fifth Amendment instead of the Fourteenth. The Supreme Court’s ruling in this case itself was probably influenced by the death of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, which Felix Frankfurter called “the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.” One year after this case was initially decided, the Court ordered states to comply with the ruling “with all deliberate speed.” While he conceded that Monroe Elementary had no specific deficiencies, attorney Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP argued that separation by race was inherently unequal. FTP, name this 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional racial segregation in public schools.
ANSWER: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka I
3. Accelerations due to it are most important when the Rossby number for a system is small, and it is given by A equals negative two omega cross v, where v is the velocity of a particle and omega is the angular velocity. An early investigator of it was William Ferrel, and a mass affected by it will move in a circular path called an “inertial circle,” causing an object in freefall on Earth to be deflected slightly to the east. For ten points, name this effect, a result of the Earth’s rotation, which affects many weather patterns, including the rotation of cyclones.
ANSWER: Coriolis effect (accept Coriolis force)
4. The Mascarene and Kerguelen Plateaus lie under it, as does the Ninety-East Ridge, which is named for a line of longitude that passes through it. It touches Wilkes Land along much of its southern shore, frigid because of the West Wind Drift, while the warm Agulhas Current flows south along its western shore. Its inlets include the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Oman, which are connected by the Strait of al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz respectively to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. It surrounds the islands of Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. FTP, name this body of water, the third largest of the world’s oceans.
ANSWER: Indian Ocean
5. This man “castrated” the manuscript of his most famous work before its 1739 printing to on the urging of Bishop Joseph Butler, who disagreed with his position on miracles. This writer argued that free will implies that human actions are random and proposed the doctrine of instrumentalism, the belief that an action’s rationality depends on the actor’s goals and desires. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion display his skeptical view of arguments for God’s existence, and, in an argument known as his “fork,” he separated statements about ideas from statements about the world in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. FTP, name this naturalist philosopher and author of A Treatise of Human Nature, an important figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.
ANSWER: David Hume
6. The process of its transmission is believed by some to have been associated with epilepsy, since the person receiving it is reported to have been cold at first and then have sweated profusely. Other times, it was understood as part of an ocular vision of a being occupying every horizon, which is odd because we usually associate it with a memorized oral tradition. Its words were promptly recorded by a following of secretaries, who arranged them in the midst of previous verses called surahs, which is why it is difficult to pinpoint the first part to have been revealed. It was not codified in its entirety until the reign of Uthman as caliph, and it was known to change frequently as God revealed more and more of it to his prophet. FTP, identify this holiest scripture of Islam.
ANSWER: The Holy Qur’an
7. The key to it may be the tiny frog in the lower left corner, as the French word for “frog” was slang for “prostitute.” It took its inspiration from The Judgment of Paris, an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, and Concert Champêtre, a painting by Giorgione and Titian. Three figures sit in the foreground, with the one on the right, a bearded man, leaning back and stretching his hand forward to the man and woman across from him. A second woman stoops in the background, but, unlike the first woman, she is clothed. Innovative for its combination of portraiture, landscape, and still life – the last represented by the spilling picnic basket in the lower left – this is, FTP, what 1863 painting by Edouard Manet?
ANSWER: Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe (accept Luncheon on the Grass)
8. This 1861 German invention comes in conventional sizes of 50, 125, 250, 500, and 1000 milliliters. A cross between it and the Griffin beaker gives the fleaker, a type of container for liquids. Well-suited for many tasks, it is used to store liquids because of its compatibility with rubber bungs. It is also used in titration, possessing a form that allows for both quick, efficient heating and thorough manual swirling. FTP, identify this common piece of lab glassware that differs from a beaker in its extended cylindrical neck and conical base.
ANSWER: Erlenmeyer flask
9. One of the workers there, Frank Wills, contacted police after noticing a small piece of tape propping open one of the doors, and the police promptly arrested five men, including Frank Strugis and James McCord, for breaking into an office there for the second time in three weeks in order to fix faulty wiretaps. McCord’s notebook contained the phone number of E. Howard Hunt, who was soon arrested in connection with the crime here, though Press Secretary Ron Ziegler famously called it nothing more than a “third-rate burglary.” The dogged investigation by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, however, turned it into a major scandal. FTP, identify this Washington, DC, hotel and namesake of the scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
ANSWER: Watergate Hotel
10. Sylvester Mazzolini wrote the response to this document at the behest of Pope Leo X, who believed that its author “when sober [would] change his mind.” Translated into German, it was spread rapidly by the newly invented printing press. It was inspired by a fundraising project for renovations to St. Peter’s Basillica in Rome, which saw Johann Tetzel wander through Europe selling indulgences, and this document may have been mailed to the Archbishop of Mainz rather than nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg as legend says. FTP, name this numerical list of grievances against the Catholic Church, written by Martin Luther.
ANSWER: 95 Theses (accept The Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences)
11. If the theater is not quiet during this film, then “it’s gonna get tragic,” note two enthusiastic young men who add that they are “about to be taken to a dream world of magic.” Before the beginning of this film, they note correctly that Matthew Perry was once Bruce Willis’s co-star. The men have found this film’s theater using Google Maps, and after paying for tickets to see it, the men note that you can “call [them] Aaron Burr by the way [they’re] dropping Hamiltons.” FTP, name this 2005 film that famously became the subject of Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell’s “Lazy Sunday” rap on Saturday Night Live.
ANSWER: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (accept The Chronic-What!-cles of Narnia from someone enthusiastic)
12. She was an early advocate of adultery for married women and of abortion; Procopius claimed in his Secret History she had benefited from the latter herself. He also wrote that her father was a circus bear trainer and that her mother was a prostitute. She had a son as the mistress of one courtesan, yet she still managed to marry a powerful man and to achieve sainthood. It was her advice during the Nika riots of 532 that probably saved both her husband and his empire, and when she died of cancer, she was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. FTP, name this Byzantine empress, the wife of Justinian I.
ANSWER: Theodora
13. Its developer, John Backus, received the Turing prize in 1977 for his work on it, and its first version appeared in 1957, with subsequent major revisions in 1966, 1977, and 1990. It has evolved to include many modern features, including procedure pointers and elements of object oriented programming, and this programming language is still in widespread use in climate modelling and other scientific applications. FTP, name this first high-level programming language, whose name is a contraction of “Formula Translating System.”
ANSWER: Fortran (accept FORTRAN, preferred for versions prior to 1990)
14. In June 1830, he was killed while riding home from a constitutional convention over which he had presided in order to hold his country together. In the nineteen years before 1830, he had led a distinguished military career, which included victories at Pichincha in Ecuador and Junín in Peru, which were followed by his miraculous victory at Ayacucho, which ensured South American independence from Spain. Seeking to retire, it was against his own will that he then became president of the newly created state of Bolivia. FTP, name this chief lieutenant of Simón Bolívar who lent his name to the judicial capital of Bolivia.
ANSWER: Antonio José de Sucre
15. This author took the title of one of his novels from the poem “The Journey of the Magi,” and his novel begins in medias res with the main character’s trial for accepting bribes. That character, Obi, travels to England for university at the cost of the Umuofia Progressive Union, but he returns home to work at the Scholarship Board, where he rejects the sexual advances of a girl who wants a scholarship. It is the character’s relationship with the outcast Clara, however, that leads to the character’s downfall. That novel, No Longer at Ease, was the sequel to a more famous novel, which tells of the struggle of Okonkwo to come to grips with colonialism and which took its title from William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” FTP, identify this famous Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart.
ANSWER: Chinua Achebe
16. First observed in 1842 by botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, this type of macromolecule can be seen effectively by applying colchicine to cells in a vial and then staining them. In fact, the macromolecule's name comes from the Greek words for color and body, though they are not visible under light microscopy during all stages of the cell cycle. While they may be circular in prokaryotes, eukaryotic versions have two arms called “p” and “q” that are both duplicated during mitosis. FTP, give the name of these molecules of DNA, of which most human cells have 23 pairs.
ANSWER: chromosome
17. He sings of his happiness in “Vi Ricorda, O Boschi Ombrosi,” then his sadness in the poignant recitative “Tu Se’ Morta” in a 1607 opera. Franz Liszt wrote a tone-poem about him, and Igor Stravinsky’s 1947 ballet named after him combined romantic and neoclassical themes. One inspiration for Stravinsky’s ballet was that original opera in which this mythological figure uses the song “Possente Spirto” to try to win over Caronte. In an irreverent 1858 work featuring the music now known as the Can-Can, this character plots with Pluto to kill his wife, is forced by Public Opinion to retrieve her, and, due to Jupiter’s thunderbolt, turns around in the final scene. FTP, identify this namesake of a Claudio Monteverdi opera and a Jacques Offenbach opéra bouffe set “in the Underworld,” the husband of Euridice.
ANSWER: Orpheus (accept Orfeo)
18. The youngest brother in this book is upset by a sport he watches through the “curling flower spaces” and recalls an occasion when T.P. drank “sassprilluh.” The oldest cuts his finger when he breaks a watch his father gave him and attempts to communicate with an Italian girl he calls “little sister.” The middle brother is frustrated by the slowness of Western Union updates on the stock market and surreptitiously cashes checks sent by his sister. That sister, the “absent center” of this novel, once climbed a tree, allowing her three brothers to see her muddy drawers; she later became pregnant by Dalton Ames. FTP, name this 1929 stream-of-consciousness novel in which Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson remember their sister Caddy, the masterpiece of William Faulkner.
ANSWER: The Sound and the Fury
19. A family plans to have six children, each of which is equally likely to be a boy or a girl. The family wishes to know the probability that at least four of their children will be boys. This may be computed by summing up the probabilities of having exactly four, five, and six boys. (pause) Given that this is equal to one sixty-fourth times the quantity six choose six plus six choose five plus six choose four, FTP, what is the probability that the family has at least four boys?