Harvard Fall Tournament
Harvard Fall Tournament
Cambridge, Massachusetts
November 10, 2007
ROUND FOURTEEN
TOSSUPS
1. He allied with the Federalists to overthrow Anastasio Bustamante, but returned to the capital the next year to take over personal control of the government from Valantín Gómez Farías after having declared, “I am retired unless my country needs me.” He immediately put down a rebellion in Zacatecas before marching north, where he executed his prisoners at the Goliad massacre, but was forced to sign the Treaties of Valasco with David Burnet after losing the Battle of San Jacinto to Sam Houston. FTP, identify this Mexican general and president who won at the Alamo.
ANSWER: Antonio López de Santa Anna
2. The search for free particles of this category is fruitless, leading particle physicists to believe that confinement theory is indeed correct. These particles have a fractional electric charges of 2/3 or -1/3, since sums of three of these particles form more commonly known particles with the elementary charge, 1. Their name is derived from Finnegans Wake, and they interact via the gauge boson of Quantum Chromodynamics, the gluon. FTP, name these particles with “flavors” that include top, bottom, up, down, strange, and charm, which are the constituents of protons and neutrons.
ANSWER: quarks
3. This writer’s unfinished novel Lucien Leuwen was published four years after his autobiographical The Life of Henry Brulard. He discussed Gina Pietranera’s marriage to Count Mosca in a novel in which Fabrizio del Dongo is imprisoned in the Farnese Tower, The Charterhouse of Parma, and his most famous work features the characters Mathilde de La Mole and Madame Renal. FTP, name this French author who wrote about Julien Sorel in The Red and The Black.
ANSWER: Stendhal (accept Marie-Henri Beyle)
4. Followers of this religion believe that the three pure ones – great, upper, and jade – are representations of its founder, and it divides the year into three epochs with a ruler living in the North Star. Its followers view the ruler’s palace as a homothetic manifestation of the country according to the principle of wu-wei in this religion that includes the Eight Immortals, “the First Principle,” and the supreme god Yu-Huang, the Jade Emperor. Based on the writings of a Zhou Dynasty bureaucrat, this is, FTP, what religion whose name means “path,” founded by Lao Tzu?
ANSWER: Daoism (accept Taoism)
5. One of the subplots in this series is a remake of The Old Man and the Sea, the filming of which is interrupted by the search for a carnivorous seal who once belonged to Amy Poehler’s character before being used in a magic show. Henry Winkler jumps over the shark that ate the seal in this series, in which Ron Howard narrates odd plotlines such as George Michael’s infatuation with Maeby, Tobias’s penchant for wearing cutoffs, and the legal troubles of George Bluth. FTP, identify this short-lived show on Fox about the family of a builder indicted for fraud.
ANSWER: Arrested Development
6. In complex analysis, the Lagrange inversion formula gives one of these for the inverse function of an analytic function, and a holomorphic function is determined uniquely by one of these at a point. Laurent and Puiseux series are generalizations of these allowing negative and fraction exponent, respectively, while in real analysis, Abel’s theorem gives the value of one of these as the argument approaches its radius of convergence. FTP, name this mathematical construct that is guaranteed to exist for infinitely differentiable functions by Taylor’s Theorem.
ANSWER: power series
7. The Lombard one included Padua, Milan, and Cremona in its effort to block Holy Roman suzerainty in Italy. The Muslim one was first led by the Aga Khan, then Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and supported the partition of India. Naxos tried to secede from the Delian one, which was led by Athens. The most famous one of these was proposed in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteenth Point, but the United States did not join after the Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. FTP, what is this collective word found in the name of the forerunner of the United Nations?
ANSWER: league
8. Little remained of it after an 1194 fire except a shroud of the Virgin Mary, the “Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière” window, and the west portal. Because its construction lasted decades, the St. Theodore statue on the south portal is of a later style than its other statues. Although nine spires were planned for it, only two were built, and even these are asymmetrical. This building is more famous, however, for the labyrinth on the floor of the interior and for its three rose windows. FTP, name this archetypal gothic cathedral located west of Paris.
ANSWER: Chartres Cathedral (accept Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Chartres)
9. One of this man’s characters kills Glen Stanley and has a relationship with Lucy Tartan and Isabel Banford, and another of his novels centers on a man who sneaks aboard a Mississippi River steamboat on April Fool’s Day. In addition to Pierre and The Confidence Man, one of his title characters works as a Manhattan clerk but “would prefer not to,” while another kills John Claggart but shows loyalty to Captain Vere. FTP, name this author of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Billy Budd, who wrote about Starbuck, Ishmael, and Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick.
ANSWER: Herman Melville
10. Requirements for this economic phenomenon involve a ban on resale, as otherwise some buyers can resell the good to others as an arbitrage opportunity. Its strictest form requires monopoly and perfect information, but oligopolies such as airlines often use its less profitable second- and third-degree types. In its perfect form, which traditionally results in maximum efficiency but zero consumer surplus, sellers charge the most that each buyer would willingly pay. FTP, name this situation in which different consumers of a good pay different prices.
ANSWER: price discrimination
11. Seven of them were arranged for the orchestra by Franz Doppler, and the first one in E-major is divided into friss and lassu sections. The fifth is called “Heroide Elegiaque,” the ninth one is titled “Carnival of Pesth,” and the last one was written for composer’s friend Kornel Abranyi. The eighteenth in F-sharp minor dubbed, “Magyar” was inspired by the composer’s country’s history, while the most famous section is the fifteenth, which is called the “Rakoczy March.” FTP, name this set of piano pieces heavily inspired by Gypsy dances composed by Franz Lizst.
ANSWER: Hungarian Rhapsodies
12. In music theory, it is a number measuring an interval's harmony. For a functor, in category theory, it is a universal cone. In topology, a net is a generalization of this concept to arbitrary topological spaces. In theoretical physics, one of these is named for Greisen, Zatsepin, and Kuzmin, and another for Chandrasekhar. If S contains all of those n, S is closed. In analysis, a convergent sequence has one of these. FTP, in calculus, what is n if n is the one number you can keep f(x) arbitrarily close to just by keeping x close enough to c but not equal to c?
ANSWER: limit
13. It was created with the help of Marilyn Sitzman, who steadied its vertigo-prone namesake as he stood on a pedestal; Life magazine soon bought it for $150,000. Three copies were made on the day of its creation and two given to Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service. Produced on a 414 PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Camera, it lasts only 26.6 seconds. Its namesake, a Ukrainian-American, could not tell whether a shot had come from the grassy knoll. FTP, identify this video shot in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, the best-known film of the Kennedy assassination.
ANSWER: Abraham Zapruder film
14. A locker filled with members of this phylum contained the only survivors of the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia. One of them causes a disease called loa loa filarial. Their amoeba-like sperm is the only known eukaryotic cell without G-Actin, while near their anuses one can find sensory organs named phasmids and, in males, the chitinous spikes they use for mating. A cuticle layer and a hydrostatic skeleton keep these psuedocoelomates in their namesake shape. FTP, name this group of worms that contains C. elegans and the hookworm.
Answer: Nematoda (accept: Nematodes, roundworms)
15. One character in this play discusses selling her highboy for $350 to finance her trip to Paris, and Act Three of this play begins with a conversation between Sam Craig and Joe Stoddard. Professor Willard is the town historian, Howie Newsome is the milkman, and Simon Stimson is the drunkard town choir director. With acts entitled “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Death,” this play centers around the romance between George Gibbs and Emily Webb. FTP, name this play set in Grover Corners and featuring the Stage Manger, written by Thornton Wilder.
ANSWER Our Town
16. The spectrophometric form of this process measures radiation absorbed by participating species, while in the coulometric variety, a uniform electric current is applied instead of a known solution. Inflection points near the middle of sigmoid curves frequently describe conclusions elicited from this technique. In high school labs, the careful release of potassium permanganate into sodium oxalate via a buret demonstrates its redox version. FTP, identify this analytical chemistry technique in which the quantitative application of a standardized solution in the presence of an electrical or colorimetric indicator is used to find the concentration of an unknown solution.
ANSWER: titration (accept volumetric analysis)
17. Their second generation included Asteria, who was turned into a quail; Astraea, the personification of moral justice; and Astraeus, father of the stars. According to the poets Nonnus and Callimachus, they feasted on the infant Dionysus. First appearing in Hesiod's Theogeny, these siblings of the Hecatonchires reigned after the youngest castrated their father, but were in turn condemned to Tartarus by the children of Cronus. FTP, name these ancient deities born of Uranus and Gaea who were succeeded by the twelve Olympians.
ANSWER: titans
18. This city’s touristy Rocks neighborhood is linked to Milsons Point by the so-called Coathanger, which is officially called the Harbour Bridge. Bordered on the north by the Hawkesbury River and sitting in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, this city sits on the world’s largest natural harbor, Port Jackson, but might be more associated with an inlet to the north, Botany Bay, where the HMS Endeavor under James Cook landed in 1770, 18 years before a penal colony was founded there. FTP, identify this city in New South Wales, the most populous city in Australia.
ANSWER: Sydney
19. Lines such as “Graves’ Disease in a dead Jew’s eyes!” appear in its “Dirge,” a section which was excised on the advice of Ezra Pound, to whom this poem is dedicated. Lines that do remain include “Hurry up please, it’s time,” found in its section “A Game of Chess,” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” from its first section, “The Burial of the Dead.” It may be most famous for its last line, the Sanskrit “Shantih shantih shantih,” and its first, “April is the cruellest month.” FTP, name this elegiac modernist poem by T.S. Eliot.
ANSWER: “The Waste Land”
20. One of his main opponents was Gilbert Foliot and one of his early successes was negotiating the marriage between his king and Margaret of France. He fled to France after refusing to accept the Constitutions of Clarendon, which recognized royal supremacy in temporal affairs, one of the many stances that would later prompt his monarch to ask, “How can I rid myself of this meddlesome priest?” when that king regretted having made him primate of the Church of England in 1162. FTP, identify this Archbishop of Canterbury whom Henry II had murdered in his cathedral.
ANSWER: St. Thomas à Becket (accept Thomas of Canterbury)
BONUSES
1. Answer these questions relating to electric circuits for ten points each.
(10) This quantity is directly proportional to the length of the material and is measured in ohms.
ANSWER: resistance
(10) This quantity measures the opposition of the circuit to a change in electric current.
ANSWER: inductance
(10) In AC circuits, capacitance, inductance, and resistance are all combined into this quantity, the effective resistance of a circuit.
ANSWER: impedance
2. For ten points each, given the Jane Austen heroine name her love interest.
(10) Elizabeth Bennet.
ANSWER: Mr. Darcy
(10) Emma Woodhouse.
ANSWER: Mr. Knightley
(10) Catherine Morland.
ANSWER: Henry Tilney (accept either)
3. It’s time to play “Name that Labor Union!” For ten points each –
(10) This union was founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886. It still exists today, though it has merged with another organization.
ANSWER: American Federation of Labor (accept AFL)
(10) This union was founded by Uriah Stephens in 1869. It stressed secrecy and inclusion of all workers, but died in the late 19th century.
ANSWER: Knights of Labor
(10) Founded in 1905, this union is known for its sometime eccentric actions, and its members are nicknamed “wobblies.” It publishes a Finnish newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota.
ANSWER: Industrial Workers of the World (accept IWW)
4. It issued Dei Verbum, discussing the central role of Scripture, and Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. For ten points each –
(10) Name this major Ecumenical Council held from 1962 to 1965 which resulted in significant reforms to the Roman Catholic Church.