2004 ACF Fall
Tossups by St. Thomas
1. This conflict was almost widened to include neutral Britain after the so-called Dogger Bank incident and featured heavy nationalistic activity on one side by the Black Dragon Society. Its climactic land battle was at Mukdenand occurred after the fall of Port Arthur. By then the losing side had already seen its fleet destroyed in the TsushimaStrait. Its peace acknowledged the surrender of southern SakhalinIslandand was concluded at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. FTP, identify this 1904-05 war fought in East Asia between the two namesakes.
Answer: Russo-Japanese War.
2. His political tract, The Conduct of Allies, was instrumental in causing the dismissal of the Duke of Marlborough from command. By then he had abandoned writing poetry, primarily due to the criticism of his cousin John Dryden. Among his notable epistles are his Drapier’s Letters and a collection of intimate letters, Journal to Stella. However he is best known for the biting satire of such works as A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. FTP, name this Irish author of A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels.
Answer: Jonathan Swift
3. Thomas Gold correctly specified the class to which these objects belonged after their discovery. That discovery had labeled them LGMs, or Little Green Men, because of an incorrect assumption that they were created by extraterrestrials. That mistake was made in 1967 by Hewish and Bell, who first observed them. However, Gold surmised that they were simply rapidly rotating neutron stars. FTP, identify these astronomical bodies whose name derives from their consistent expulsion of radiation every few seconds or milliseconds.
Answer: pulsars or pulsating radio star
4. It must have a positive slope, and because the factor it measures cannot be negative it must be concave up and cannot rise above the line y = x, known as the line of perfect equality. The area between it and the line of perfect equality is known as the Gini coefficient, and at each point its y-value shows the cumulative percentage of a given asset owned by the bottom x percent of the sample. First developed by its namesake American economist during the early-20th century, FTP, identify this construct from welfare economics used to illustrate income inequality.
Answer: Lorenz Curve
5. Surviving studies for the work show that two men, a student and a seated sailor, were originally meant to have been included in this painting. A thin strip of shades of brown appears on the left, but more disconcerting is the wedge of melon, bunch of grapes, and other pieces of fruit that are out of place at the bottom center. The final word in its title refers, surprisingly, to a red-light district in Barcelona whose prostitutes inspired this 1907 work. Often considered the earliest Cubist work, FTP, name this depiction of five female nudes and first masterpiece of Pablo Picasso.
Answer: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
6. His first major case was 1935’s Murray v. Pearson, but more important was Shelley v. Kraemer in which he succeeded in abolishing “protective covenants.” In 1965 he became U.S. Solicitor General, a position which acted as a springboard to his most famous post in which he wrote notable dissenting opinions in San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez and 1978’s Bakke case, clearly stating his support of affirmative action. FTP, name this one-time NAACP lawyer who won Brown v Board of Education and became the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court.
Answer: Thurgood Marshall.
7. It is the profession of Walter Hartwright, the ostensible protagonist of Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White. It is also the profession of Noemie Nioche in Henry James’ The American and while he is in Paris, Philip Carey attempts this occupation in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Perhaps more famously it is the eventual vocation of Charles Strickland in another Maugham novel, Moon and Sixpence. FTP, name this craft in which Basil Hallward briefly engages to create the title of Oscar Wilde’s novel about Dorian Gray.
Answer: painter or draughtsman (prompt on “artist;” accept word forms like “painting,” etc.)
8. Discrete spectra of them are produced by electron transitions between the normally-filled lower electron levels of atoms. Continuous spectra of them commonly result from bremsstrahlung, or “braking” radiation. In the work of Laue and Bragg, a beam of them were diffracted by a crystal lattice. Slightly less energetic than gamma rays, FTP, identify this form of electromagnetic radiation commonly used to provide images of internal body structures and first observed by Wilhelm Roentgen.
Answer: X-rays
9. Popular festivals in honor of this god include the Tubilustrium and the Equirria. His sacred animals were the woodpecker and wolf and his epithets included Gradivus and Ultor. His consort was the Sabine fertility goddess Nerio, but Ovid relates that he was tricked into sleeping with Anna Perenna. The chief temple of his sat on the Capitoline hill beside those of Jupiter and Quirinus, the latter of whom is associated with his son Romulus. FTP, name this Roman god of war often identified with the Greek Ares.
Answer: Mars or Mavors or Mamars or Maris (do not prompt or accept on buzz of “Ares”)
10. Its name is derived from the Turkic for “island”, referring to its position as a remote outpost of water in a sea of desert. Its Barsa-Kelmes island houses an important nature reserve and this body of water is now divided into a small northern “lake” and a large southern one, but this was not the case before cotton production began diverting river water in the 1960’s. It is fed by the Syr Darya and Amu DaryaRivers and is shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. FTP, name this rapidly-shrinking Central Asian lake.
Answer: Aral Sea
11. With the death of the illegitimate prince Enzio, this house became extinct. Its penultimate king was another illegitimate son, Manfred, who was the uncle of its last ruler Conradin, who was a king of Sicily. Its founder married Agnes, the daughter of Henry IV, and from their union came a line of kings that included Otto IV and this house’s greatest ruler, Frederick II, who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1215. FTP, name this German ruling family that arose in the Swabian castle of Staufen.
Answer: Hohenstaufen
12. Ian Fleming induced this writer to interview Lucky Luciano in Naples, resulting in the essay “My Friend Luco.” He died shortly thereafter, leaving Poodle Springs unfinished in the wake of the failure of his last complete novel, Playback. He skewered Hollywood in The Little Sister and used an upstate California setting in The Lady in the Lake. All of those works featured his most famous character, who would meet his future wife in The Long Goodbye. FTP, name this American writer whose novel The Big Sleep introduced the detective Philip Marlowe.
Answer: Raymond Chandler
13. Sites that show this species’ later development include Torralba in Spain and Terra Amata in France. The “baton method” was part of the Acheulean tool tradition which they developed. And sites such as Swartkans in South Africa suggested their development of the use of fire and cooking made them the first hominid species to do so. They disappeared sometime around 250,000 years ago and early finds of this species included Java Man and Peking Man. FTP, name this hominid whose named is Latin for “upright man.”
Answer: Homo Erectus
14. It opens with a French overture in minuet rhythm, “Fear no danger,” though more typical songs follow. These include “Purse thy conquest, Love” and “Come away, fellow sailors,” as well as the aria, “When I am laid in Earth,” which is sung by one of the title characters and is known as her “lament.” Nahum Tate wrote the libretto and was present at its first performance at Josias Priest’s School for Young Ladies in Chelsea. FTP, name this opera about a queen of Carthage and a Trojan prince, the most famous work of Henry Purcell.
Answer: Dido and Aeneas
15. This philosophical concept originally applied to a theory which holds that inflected verbs have the same significance as verbs in the present indicative. In its more famous incarnation it applied to the flatus vocis doctrine of Roscelin. It was moderated by Abelard’s Conceptualism although later, it became more extreme under William of Ockham who fiercely opposed the idea of Platonic forms. FTP identify this philosophical doctrine that held abstract concepts to have no reality outside of the mind, and which takes its name from the Latin for “of or pertaining to names.”
Answer: Nominalism
16. His early successes included the defeat of Domitius Ahenobarbus and King Iarbas in Africa. He reinforced Caecilius Metellus Pius against Sertorius in Spain and the lex Gabinia gave him a special command against Mediterranean pirates. He ended the war of Spartacus and the final revolt of Mithridates VI, but his military success came to an end approximately fifteen years later when he fought to a draw at Dyrrachium and was crushed at Pharsalusin 48 BC by his greatest rival. FTP, name this member of the first triumvirate and chief rival of Julius Caesar.
Answer: Pompey the Great or Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
17. Among the lesser known works of this series are The Quest for the Absolute and The Village Curate. It also includes such early novellas as Madame Firmian and Colonel Chabert, but the series is often considered to have begun with a historical novel of counterrevolutionaries entitled Les Chouans[lay shoo-ON]. The more famous works, such as Lost Illusions, feature such recurring characters as the criminal Vautrin who, along with the ambitious Eugene Rastignac, appears in the best-known member of the series, Pere Goriot. FTP, name this cycle of 90 novels and novellas, the masterwork of Honore Balzac.
Answer: The Human Comedy or La Comedie humaine
18. The most recent scale that assigns values to this property is the Allred-Rochow Scale. Another method for measuring it was developed by Robert Mulliken, who stated that it is equal to one-half times ionization energy minus electron affinity. A more useful method of its determination was made by Linus Pauling in 1932. Pauling set Lithium as the baseline and gave the highest value to Fluorine. FTP, name this measure of a bonded atom’s ability to attract shared electrons.
Answer: electronegativity
19. Highly symmetric, its largest buildings are all located in a north-south line along its center. Those structures include the u-shaped Meridian Gate and the central-most Hall of Supreme Harmony- which contained the official throne of the emperor for the most important affairs of state. The majority of it was built during the first two decades of the 15th century under the patronage of Yong-le. Now referred to as the PalaceMuseum by its nation’s government, FTP, identify this orange-colored palace complex in Beijing, China.
Answer: Forbidden City (prompt on “PalaceMuseum” before mentioned)
20. Members of this political grouping included former Whigs Lewis Parsons and James Alcorn, but more notorious was Franklin Moses, Jr. Many of them, unlike William Holden and John Mosby, were from the small planter caste. General James Longstreet was also regarded as a member of this group, whose name was originally used to designate small animals below the attention of farmers and has now come to refer to allies of carpetbaggers. FTP, give this term for southerners who joined the Republican Party and supported Reconstruction.
Answer: Scalawags
21. This author helped spread his philosophy by founding a school of thought at his estate of Santiniketan. One of his philosophical concerns was the concept of “bridal mysticism”, which was outlined in his work Sadhana. However it was for poetry, in such collections as The Gardener and The Crescent Moon, that he became known. It was another collection, Gitanjali, that featured a poem that became his country’s national anthem. FTP, name this writer who wrote in Bengali, the first non-European and Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Answer: Sir Rabindranath Tagore
22. It can be topologically abstracted as a connected graph with four vertices and seven edges, two pairs of which connect the same two sets of points. The fact that it had no solution was achieved by proving that no connected graph with more than two “odd” vertices could have a circuit that traverses every edge and concludes at its starting point without crossing any edge twice. It was the original conundrum that led to Euler’s formulation of graph theory. FTP, identify this classic problem inspired by the crossings of the PregelRiver in the namesake Prussian city.
Answer: KönigsbergBridge Problem
23. Its single most enduring image was arguably the self-immolation of Jan Palach. Its leader tried to defend it in the conference at Cierna by making minor compromises. Facilitated by the resignation of Antonin Novotny as first secretary, it officially came to an end with the appointment of Gustav Hasak although it had practically been ended the previous August by an invasion of Warsaw Pact members. FTP, identify this period of liberal communist reform in 1969 initiated by Aleksandr Dubcek in Czechoslovakia during the namesake season.
Answer: Prague Spring.
24. Its “mutual” variety, symbolized by the letter M, occurs when two circuits or circuit components are linked magnetically. Its much more prevalent “self” variety, which also involves the creation of an emf, is a consequence of Lenz’s Law and is usually given by the letter L. Its standard SI measure has units of volt-seconds per ampere, and as an electromagnetic analogue of inertia it basically measures a circuit’s resistance to changes in current. FTP, identify this physical property measured in Henrys.
Answer: inductance
2004 ACF Fall
Bonuses by St. Thomas
1. Name these things about the human digestive system, FTP each:
A. (10) This is the name for the partially digested mixture of food and secretions first formed in the stomach.
Answer: chyme
B. (10) This sphincter lies between the stomach and duodenum, and serves to regulate the passage of chyme into the small intestine.
Answer: pyloric sphincter orpyloric valve
C. (10) This last and longest segment of the small intestine terminates at its namesake valve, where it is joined with the cecum of the large intestine
Answer: ileum
2. Name these things about an American political crisis during the Great Depression, FTP each:
A. (10) Led by Walter Waters, this group included of 15,000 WWI veterans gathered in Washington over the summer of 1932 to demand promised payments from the US government.
Answer: Bonus Army orBonus Expeditionary ForceorBonus Marchers
B. (10) The man who led the effort to disperse the Bonus Army was this General, who did in fact return to the Phillippines in October 1944.
Answer: Douglas MacArthur
C. Among the officers who helped lead General MacArthur’s removal of the Bonus Army was this then major who led two squadrons of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment and later commanded the Seventh Army in its 1943 invasion of Sicily
Answer:George Smith Patton, Jr.
3. He wrote of a futuristic Fascist takeover of the U.S. in It Can’t Happen Here and of racial intolerance in Kingsblood Royal. FTP each, name—
A. (10) This Minnesota-born novelist of Arrowsmith.
Answer: (Harry) Sinclair Lewis
B. (10) The 1920 Sinclair Lewis novel about the Kennicotts of Gopher Prairie.
Answer: Main Street
C. (10) The 1929 Lewis novel that concerns the European travels of a former American car manufacturer and his philandering wife Fran.
Answer: Dodsworth
4. Name these awesome characters from Middle Eastern myth, FTP each:
A. (10) This Ugaritic storm god and foremost deity of the Canaanites had a name from the ancient Semitic for “Lord”.
Answer: Baal
B. (10) This Persian sun god’s slaying of the cosmic bull was the prototype for a famous mystery ritual in Roman times and his worship was popular among soldiers.
Answer: Mithra orMithras
C. (10) Along with his friend Enkidu, he set out to find the deluge survivor Utnapishtim as chronicled in a Babylonian epic.
Answer: Gilgamesh
5. Name these major musical works of the 20th century:
A. (10) For 10 points, This minimalist “space opera” by Philip Glass was the first work in a trilogy that concluded with Akhnaten and Satyagraha.
Answer: Einstein on the Beach
B. (5) For 5 points, This 1913 Igor Stravinsky ballet was divided into two parts entitled Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice, and was so radical that it prompted a riot at its Paris premier.
Answer: The Rite of Spring(or Le sacre du printemps or Vesna Svyashchennaya)