2008 Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament - Packet 2
By Maryland C (Mike Bentley, Jeremy Eaton, Brittany Clark), Charles Meigs, Gautam Kandlikar, and Andrew Hart
Edited by Rob Carson, Andrew Hart, and Gautam Kandlikar
Tossups
1. The Covode Committee chastised him for allowing the War and Navy Departments to award no-bid contracts, and late in his term he promoted his Postmaster General, Joseph Holt, to Secretary of War. Along with John Mason and Pierre Soule, this then ambassador of England was directed by William L. Marcy to explore the feasibility of purchasing Cuba via the Ostend Manifesto. He gained office thanks to the splintering of votes from Millard Fillmore on the Know Nothing ticket and John C. Fremont on the Republican ticket. For 10 points, identify this bachelor president from Pennsylvania who saw seven states secede from the Union after his successor, Abraham Lincoln, was elected.
ANSWER: James Buchanan
2. The last of these compositions is an unfinished G-minor piece that is either called Zwickau or the Jungendsinfonie. These pieces are sometimes paired on recordings with their composer’s “Manfred” overture. The final completed one of these is in D-minor, and two versions exist, the earlier 4-movement piece with Italian tempo markings, and the later pause-less 5-movement arrangement marked in German. The third is in five movements, with the fourth movement commemorating the archbishop of Cologne’s promotion to cardinal, and depicts life along a certain river. For 10 points, name these orchestral works, the third of which is the Rhenish and the first of which is the Spring.
ANSWER: symphonies of Robert Schumann
3. A ruler named after this deity is a semi-legendary king of Tollan and was named Topiltzin. Several Mormons, including President of the Church John Taylor, claim that this deity is the same as Jesus. This man either threw his father’s assassins off a cliff, or rubbed chili peppers in their open wounds and made challaces out of their skulls in the manner of Mike Sorice. His mother is held to be Chamalman, while his father is Tonacatecutle. One myth holds that he left his followers using a raft of snakes, while another holds that his opposite, Tezcatlipoca, exiled him. For 10 points, name this creator sky deity, a feathered serpent of the Aztec pantheon who is not to be confused with Hernan Cortes.
ANSWER: Quetzalcoatl
4. Maryanoff and Reitz studied deviations from the proposed mechanism of this reaction, discovering a phenomenon they dubbed “stereochemical drift.” One modification of this reaction uses phenyllithium and hydrochloric acid to convert an erthyro betaine into the threo variety. That modification allows the products of this reaction to be made in the E or trans form, while the normal variety can only create the Z or cis form. This reaction with a modification named after Schlosser has a phenylphosphine oxide byproduct which is created from a phosphonium ylide (ih-lid) reagent. Initiated by reacting an aldehyde or ketone with an ylide, for 10 points, identify this organic synthesis that is used to synthesize alkenes.
ANSWER: Wittig Reaction
5. Tush Hawg tries to get Nunkie to play a game of cards in this author's play Poker!, while more successful plays included From Sun to Sun and All de Live Long Day. In a short story by this author, the protagonist is criticized by her husband Sykes for hypocritically working on the Sabbath until that wife, Delia Jones, "talks back". Besides Sweat, this Eatonville native author is probably best known for a work that ends with a hurricane and the contracting of rabies by Teacake, the third husband of the protagonist, Janie Crawford. For 10 points, identify this Harlem Renaissance author who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God.
ANSWER: Zora Neale Hurston
6. During a thunderstorm, this character is given wine from a drunken butler and says that he would teach the drunkard how to “snare the nimble marmoset” as a gesture of thanks and praise. In another part of the play this character is in he is said to have attempted to have raped his master’s daughter and would have populated the island with many versions of himself if he were not stopped. This character’s mother worshipped the goddess Setebos and trapped the water sprite, Ariel in a ‘cloven pine’ for 14 years. Son of the witch Sycorax and servant of the wizard Prospero, for 10 points, identify this monstrous mooncalf from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
ANSWER: Caliban
7. Canova created a nude sculpture of this figure holding an apple and a spear posing as Mars the Peacemaker. His portrait where he is holding a staff with a pointing hand on the end of it is often compared to God the Father from the Ghent Altarpiece, a portrait by Ingres. Antoine-Jean Gros depicted touching soldiers dying of the plague at the Pesthouse in Jaffa. He is shown crowing his kneeling wife in a coronation portrait by the artist of The Sabine Women. For 10 points, identify this man shown on his horse crossing the Alps by David.
ANSWER: Napoleon I Bonaparte
8. A hypothetical method of decay for these particles involves breaking into a positron and a neutral pion and would have a half-life on the order of 10 to the 35 years. In astronomy, these particles are employed in a namesake chain located in the core’s of stars in order to synthesis lighter elements. Particles of this type are typically composed of two up quarks and a single down quark and these particles make up about 90% of all cosmic rays. Discovered by Ernest Rutherford, for 10 points, identify this subatomic particles that contributes the positive charge of an atom’s nucleus.
ANSWER: Proton
9. It was based on the second part of a trilogy of plays, the last of which was The Traitor. Duke, Wade and Benjamin make up the three sons of one of this work's families, and its innovations included using magnesium flares to capture night shots. The mulatto Lydia Brown causes the disastrous sexual attraction of a prominent senator in one scene, while later Gus forces Flora to jump off a cliff after she rejects his marriage proposal. It adopted the Dunning School's historical outlook and was based on a Thomas Dixon play about the Thaddeus P. Stevens spoof, Austin Stoneman. For 10 points, identify this landmark 1915 D. W. Griffith silent film notorious for its idealized portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.
ANSWER: The Birth of a Nation (or The Clansmen)
10. In the east of this country lies the city of Perquin in Morazan department, near the site of the El Mozote, where several hundred civilians were killed in a massacre. The west of this country is notable for its Ruta de Flores and archaeological sites like Joya (hoya) de Ceren and Tazumal, and the neo-Gothic cathedral of the country's second-largest city Santa Ana. This country's capital is home to the Flor Blanca stadium, where a dirty dishrag was famously raised in place of another country's burnt flag, and the more modern Cuscutlan Stadium. Home to cities such as San Miguel and San Vicente, for 10 points, name this Central American country with no Caribbean coastline bordered by Guatemala and Honduras.
ANSWER: El Salvador
11. “An Abyssinian maid” appears to the reader of this work “Singing of Mount Abora” and the narrator states that those who can hear her music “should see them[selves] there” and “Weave a circle round” the title character three times. Its title was inspired by a passage from Purchas' Pilgrimage, and its author was interrupted from writing by someone from Porlock. “Gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “many an incense-bearing tree” also appear along Alph the sacred river, which runs “through caverns measureless to man,” in, for 10 points, what Coleridge poem whose title ruler decrees a “stately pleasure dome” in Xanadu.
ANSWER: Kubla Khan
12. Despite the advantage of one side's Chassepot rifles in this conflict, that side got bogged down near the Saar River early in this war. Other engagements in this war saw the successive defeat of forces under Bazaine at the battles of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte. As a consequence of this conflict, the Papal States were annexed by Italy and Alsace-Lorraine also changed hands in the Treaty of Frankfurt. Prompted by the attempt to install Prince Leopold on the throne of Spain by Otto von Bismarck, it saw the decisive Battle of Sedan and led to the Paris Commune. For 10 points, identify this conflict that saw the defeat of Napoleon III and the 2nd Empire.
ANSWER: Franco-Prussian War (or Franco-German War or the 1870 War)
13. Immunoblots of urea fractions from sufferers of it show that the misfolded TDP-43 protein is a major component of UBIs and similar pathological molecules are found in FTLD-U sufferers. Mutations in the SOD1 gene are found in some patients suffering from its familial variety which hurts their ability to attack free radicals, while the elevated presence of BMAA in the diet of the Chamorro people of Guam increases their risk of suffering from a complex of Parkinsonism and this disease. High levels of glutamate lead to widespread motor neuron degeneration, but patients retain their cognitive abilities. For 10 points, identify this disease, which Stephen Hawking suffers from and is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
ANSWER: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease until mentioned
14. With this artist's most famous band his first hit was "Breakdown", although his next album You're Gonna Get It! which contained tracks like "I Need to Know" was more successful. As a solo artist, this onetime member of the Traveling Wilburys found post-9/11 play with his "I Won't Back Down". One of his biggest hits, from the album Full Moon Fever, tells the title figure to "Take it easy baby / Make it last all night", and another track from that album mentions a person "crazy 'bout Elvis" who also "loves horses". For 10 points, identify this artist who, at this year's Superbowl with his Heartbreakers, played Runnin' Down a Dream, Free Fallin' and American Girl.
ANSWER: Tom Petty
15. Takeo Doi criticized one of this author’s works in The Anatomy of Dependence. Alongside Gene Weltfish, this author of Race: Science and Politics wrote a pamphlet that bashed Nazism on the basis that all humans are equally intelligent, The Races of Mankind. This anthropologist contrasted the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” cultures of the Pueblo and Plains Indians, in a work that also talked about the Dobu and Kwakiutl, and another of her works talked about the “shame culture” that led to ritual suicide in Japan. For 10 points, name this author of Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
ANSWER: Ruth Benedict [accept Ruth Fulton]
16. His theory of history claimed that new movements arise out of the contradictions in their forerunners in his talkings, posthumously published as Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Strongly influenced by Jakob Bohme, his idea of sublation between propositions was outlined in his The Science of Logic, and he divided the mind into “subjective,” “objective,” and “absolute” categories in his three-part work Philosophy of Right. His magnum opus contains the first postulation of the Master/Slave synthesis. For 10 points, name this founder of the dialectic who wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit.
ANSWER: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
17. A parallel approach to this algorithm requires only n over two iterations and is known as either alternating or odd-even. One optimization to this algorithm is the Cocktail approach, while it is improved significantly with the Combing approach because the turtles that normally slow down this algorithm move faster because they're compared with elements far apart. Although it shares a Big O of n squared runtime with Insertion Sort, it is typically much slower for randomized data. Functioning by swapping pairs of elements in the wrong order, for 10 points, identify this naive sorting algorithm.
ANSWER: Bubble Sort (prompt on just "Sort")
18. This man’s calligrapher Omar Aqta was so skilled that he supposedly transcribed the entire Qu’ran on a signet ring. He promoted unity among his soldiers by founding the tradition of Kurash wrestling. His grandson Shah Rukh briefly reunited his empire after it was divvied up among his descendants. He kidnapped the artisans of Damascus and was victorious over Tughluq at Panipat in 1398, after which he sacked Delhi. He waged war with the Knights of Rhodes at Smyrna, and his underling Tokhtamysh fought against Russia for him before turning against him, leading this man to order rebels’ skulls stacked into pyramids. For 10 points, name this Samarkand-based cripple.
ANSWER: Tamerlane [or Timur the Lame; or Emir Timur or Tamberlaine or Timur-i Leng]
19. Many of this man’s ideas for his works are collected in his Notebooks, 1960-1977, which details his inspiration for People are Living There. Miss Helen collects cement sculptures which she arranges to face east, and converses with Elsa Barlow in this author’s The Road to Mecca. One of this man’s works features the bond between Zachariah and Morris, two brothers with different colored skin, while another of his works takes place in St. George’s Park Tea Room and sees Sam Semela’s relationship with Hally altered. For 10 points, name this South African author of The Blood Knot and MASTER HAROLD...and the Boys.
ANSWER: Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard
20. Notable creations of this civilization include the Kunz Axe which shows a figure crossing its arms and a child holding a were-jaguar in the Las Limas Monument. Some scholars have hypothesized that their most famous relics also doubled as thrones, and their writing system is demonstrated on the Cascajal Block at their site at San Lorenzo. They constructed a Great Pyramid at La Venta, and they are named for the Nahuatl word for "rubber people", as they probably originated the ballgame. For 10 points, identify this ancient civilization of Mesoamerica, best known for their colossal stone heads.
ANSWER: Olmec Civilization