ACF Fall 2006
Tossups by Harding A (Jason Loy)
1. In 1927, Isamu Noguchi served as this man's assistant for seven months, and in 2004, one of his works, Danaide, sold for a then record $18.1 million dollars. Sophisticated Young Lady is an alternate name for one of his works, and Princess X consists of only the title feature’s neck and head. A portrait of Baroness Renée Frachon inspired one of his most famous works, Sleeping Muse. His most famous achievement was a series of sixteen sculptures in bronze and marble that attempted to capture the essence of flight by eliminating wings and feathers. FTP, name this Romanian-born French sculptor of Sleeping Muse and the Bird in Space series.
ANSWER: Constantin Brancusi
2. From 1814 to 1840 in this nation, marriage incurred a ridiculously high tax and was forbidden among full-blooded Spaniards, a result of the anti-aristocratic rule of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. This country was also the site of the Febrerista Revolt, which briefly displaced martial president Eusebio Ayala and chief general José Félix Estigarribia, and a pro-democracy coup led by Andrés Rodríguez in 1989. Run by Jesuits until 1750, it was later taken over by Francisco Lopez, who got half half its population was killed by starting the War of the Triple Alliance. Seventy-odd years later, this country which is currently led by Nicanor Duarte opposed Bolivia in the Chaco War; more recently, it endured thirty-two years of dictatorship. FTP, name this landlocked South American country which is probably not mourning the August 2006 death of Alfredo Stroessner.
ANSWER: Republic of Paraguay
3. In a play by this man subtitled “The Double Discovery,” rumors of a plot to kill King Sancho turn out to be false, which legalizes the marriage between Leonora and Torrismond. A commemorative object made in Poland is the title item of his “Satire Against Sedition,” “The Medalll,” and he wrote an essay in which Lisideus, Eugenius, and Crites argue over whether classical, French, or contemporary English drama is greater, “Of Dramatic Poesie.” His dramas include one in which Rhodophil rivals Palamede for the hand of Melantha and another, Tyrannic Love, which features the bombastic Maximin, who later reappears in his poetic satire of Thomas Shadwell, “Mac Flecknoe.” Also known for his “Song for St. Cecilia’s day,” this is, FTP, what author of the political “The Hind and the Panther” and the long poem “Absalom and Achitophel.”
ANSWER: John Dryden
4. This poem’s first line is echoed at the beginning of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Exposure,” and its sixth and seventh stanzas are quoted during Paul Hogan’s dirge in Act II of A Moon for the Misbegotten. The author evokes several synesthetic images, such as “Tasting of flora” and his inability to see “what soft incense hangs upon the boughs.” He refers to the Biblical Ruth “amid the fields of alien corn” and contrasts “Bacchus and his pards” with “the viewless wings of Poesy.” In the sixth stanza, the author says, “many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death,” and that he has “become a sod” to the addressee’s “high requiem,” while in the first stanza, he says, “My heart aches … as though of hemlock I had drunk,” and wonders at the addressee’s ability to sing “with full-throated ease.” FTP, name this John Keats poem in which the speaker claims, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”
ANSWER: “Ode to a Nightingale”
5. During his reign, a group of five men, largely educated in England, formed a movement that rose from an earlier movement meant to “expel the barbarians.” Fictional works that framed this ruler’s reign are “The Beefeater,” which shows the effects of a treaty his people signed in 1854, as well as “The Nose,” which was published four years after this ruler’s death and focuses on the veneration of “Western” features. His reign also saw the Satsuma rebellion, as a reaction to the reduction of classes in his nation. Also alive for the formulation of his namesake Constitution in 1889, as well as victory in a war that ended with a treaty negotiated by Teddy Roosevelt, FTP name this Emperor of Japan, whose name lends itself to an Era and a Restoration.
ANSWER: Meiji Tenno Mutsuhito (accept Meiji Era or Restoration or Period.)
6. His insistence on rigor in geometry led him to establish axioms of betweenness, congruence, continuity, parallelism, and incidence, discussed in his The Foundations of Geometry. His first major achievement was a proof of the finiteness theorem, and later accomplishments include a proof of Waring’s theorem and a description of the infinite dimensional space used in functional analysis that now bears his name. Extending Kronecker’s theorem, justifying Schubert's enumerative geometry, determining whether solutions to Lagrangians are always analytic, and the axiomatization of physics are four of the 23 eponymous problems posed by, FTP, which German mathematician in 1900 as the most important of the 20th century?
ANSWER: David Hilbert
7. The people of Nauru believed it was formed from the smaller snail found by Areop Enap, and the Maori named it Marama. In Hawaii, it is represented by Kega and Uri, the two aspects of Hina. It is represented by Ilazki, whose name means “light of the dead”, in the Basque pantheon, while Ix Chel and Ix Ch’up are the two aspects of the goddess of this entity in Mayan mythology. Called Mani by the Norse, it is rather mischievous, having stolen the children Hjuki and Bil. The Sumerian Nanna and his Akkadian counterpart Sin, the Shinto Tsuki-Yomi, the Greek Selene, and the Roman Luna are all deities of, FTP, which celestial body?
ANSWER: moon
8. The city of Caen became the seat of a “federalist” organization formed in reaction to this group’s downfall, an event resulting from the successful intrigues against them by the Club of Cordeliers. Counting Dumouriez, Condorcet, and Carnot among their members, they formed around a platform of foreign war, succesfully engineering the invasion of Austria. In 1793, the fall from grace of ex-Minister of War Jean-Nicolas Pache destroyed their majority in the Legislative Assembly, and forty of them were guillotined during that year’s Halloween. Sometimes known by the name of their leader Jacques Pierre Brissot, they sat to the right of The Plain in the assembly and opposed the Jacboins. FTP, name this moderate French Revolutionary faction.
ANSWER: Girondins [or Girondists; accept Brissotins before “Brissot” is read] Its Cogge ships helped it gain power in the region, and by 1300 it had established
9. One of his attendants was represented by an oxen, and another was the god of water, and represented by a snake. Vohu Manah and Haurvatat, together with Asha, Kshathra, Armaiti, and Ameretat, were called the Amesha Spentas, who opposed the Daevas. His father, Zurvan, was a deity of space, time, and fate, and his son, Atar, battled a dragon, Azhi Dahaka, that cut Zima in half with a saw. Called Ormazdh in the religion’s contemporary form, it was Vohu Manah who appeared to a certain prophet near the Daitya River, invited him to come to heaven, and inspired him to compose the Gathas, part of the Avesta. FTP, name this god, the counterpart of Ahriman, the embodiment of good, and the supreme deity in Zoroastrianism.
ANSWER: Ahura Mazda (accept Ormazdh before mentioned)
10. It used such devices as the Tohopesate, a military pact, and the Verhansung, a final exclusion of recalcitrant members, to enforce its interests. Albrecht of Mecklenburg attempted to destroy it by hiring Klaus Störtebeker’s pirates, the Vitalienbrüder, to war against this organization. Another war, with England, lasted from 1468 to 1474, a century after it signed the Treaty of Straslund which ended its war with Denmark. Founded by Henry the Lion, it declined after expelling Cologne and Brunswick in the fifteenth century, and only Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck remained as members by 1669. FTP, name this Baltic trade confederation.
ANSWER: Hanseatic League [or Hansa]
11. His early works included self portraits such as The Wounded Man, The Cellist, and The Man with a Pipe. His works concerning dormancy include The Sleeping Spinner and an erotic work featuring two females entitled The Sleepers. One of his best-known works, which depicts a young and old man performing the titular backbreaking action, was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden, and another depicts the internment of a peasant in the presence of two clergy wearing red. FTP, name this French painter of The Stone-breaker and The Burial at Organs.
ANSWER: Gustav Courbet
12. Works espousing this group's beliefs include "Theory of Taxation" and "Rural Philosophy," along with their namesake work by du Pont, subtitled "The Natural Constitution of the Government Most Advantageous to Humankind." They divided workers into productive, sterile, and proprietor classes, and they attacked mercantilism in their belief that taxes should only be levied on land. They believed that among economic activities, only agriculture yielded a net profit, and they were supporters of the laissez-faire doctrine in part due to their mystical “natural order” theory. Including the likes of La Trosne, Abbe Baudeau, and Marquis de Mirabeau, FTP name this group of French economists led by the author of Tableau Economique, Francois Quesnay.
ANSWER: Physiocrats
13. He writes that “For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil” in a poem in which he also claims, “For I am made as a naked blade.” He calls out to “Gods of the Winged Shoe” in another poem, and in a dramatic monologue by this man Bertram de Born calls out “Hell blot black for always the thought ‘Peace!’” from his castle at Altaforte. In a long poem he describes a character who is “Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn” and he published a heavily embellished translation of books two and three of the “elegies” of Sextus Propertius. Other notable translations include Sophocles’ Women of Trachs and Li Po’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” and he was the editor of the vorticist publication Blast. Also the author of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, this is FTP what expatriate author of The Cantos?
ANSWER: Ezra Pound
14. One youth in this work is notably called “Della-croy” by his comrades Bobby and Harry while playing with some rocks. Clyde Dunbar is missing due to a broken leg, but his son Horace is only 16, so Janey has to take over for him. Mrs. Graves remarks that “Time sure goes fast” and “Seems like we got through with the last one only last week” about the central event. Old Man Warner opposes its abolishment, while Mr. Summers just wants a new box. Mr. Martin and his son Baxter help set it up, after which Adams, Watson, and others come forward to participate. Eventually it is ended when Mr. Hutchison receives a black dot, which leads to his wife’s stoning. FTP name this story about a fatal game of chance by Shirley Jackson.
ANSWER: The Lottery
15. In the one-dimensional equation for the radial wave function, the term for this quantity is equivalent to a repulsive potential. None of the individual components of its operator commute with each other, but its operator does commute with the Hamiltonian of it. A consequence of the conservation of this quantity is that a radius vector drawn from the sun to any planet seeps out equal areas in equal time intervals, and Bohr proposed the quantization of it in units of Planck's constant divided by 2 pi. In classical mechanics, the derivative of this quantity with respect to time is the net torque. FTP name this conserved rotational quantity defined as the cross product of position and its corresponding linear quantity, symbolized L.
ANSWER: angular momentum
16. This man based his cantata “Aeolus Propitiated” on a work by Nicholas Harmoncourt, and he wrote only three oratorios, the Easter, Christmas, and Ascension. He later returned to mythological themes with a cantata featuring the son of Alcmene “at the crossroads.” String works include six suites for solo cello and the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, but better known are a set of 10 “puzzle canons” on a royal theme, “A Musical Offering,” and six concertos written for the margrave of their titular state. FTP name this prolific contrapuntal composer of The Art of Fugue and the Brandenburg Concertos.
ANSWER: Johann Sebastian Bach
17. Their occurrence is partially explained by the Frohlich model, and Matthias noticed that none of them are lanthanides or actinides and related a high transition temperature in them to an odd number of valence electrons. Tuyn’s law relates their threshold temperature to the critical strength of their external magnetic field, and a type one material’s transition into one of these includes an exclusion of magnetic fields known as the Meissner effect. In one prominent theory, their existence is explained by electrons condensing near the Fermi level into boson-like Cooper pairs. FTP name this class of materials described by the BCS theory, characterized by zero electrical resistance.
ANSWER: superconductor
18. The nations involved in this rhubarb patched things up with the Treaty of Mortefontaine and the new diplomatic team of Murray, Davie, and Ellsworth. It arose from an attempt to reconcile the seizure of 316 ships and the relentless campaigning against Florida and British vessels by Edmond Genet as well as other issues emanating from the Quasi War. Elbridge Gerry remained in the capital after this event, which had caused the negotiations with Hottinguer, Hauterval, and Bellamy to break off, while John Marshall and Charles Pinckney left, the latter muttering “No, no, not a sixpence!” Certainly, the ten million dollar loan and quarter million dollar bribe that Talleyrand demanded was not paid. FTP, name this scandal that takes its name from the pseudonyms used to hide the identities of the French negotiators.