TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you're given a question, along with three passages, 1, 2, and 3. Your job is to determine which passage can be used to answer the question by searching for further information using terms from the passage. Indicate your choice as 1, 2, or 3.
PROBLEM: Question: When was the critic who coined the term "rockumentaries" born? Passage 1:Payton's big break came when she was cast as Harriet Winslow, the elevator operator on the ABC sitcom 'Perfect Strangers in 1987. Her performance was so well received by audiences that she was given her own sitcom, Family Matters, in 1989. Continuing her character Harriette Winslow from Perfect Strangers, she played a mother in an African-American middle-class family living in Chicago, Illinois. Payton left Family Matters partway through its final season, appearing for the last time on December 19, 1997. Payton's character was played by Judyann Elder in the show's remaining eight episodes. In 2002, Payton appeared on the "TV Moms" episode of the Anne Robinson version of The Weakest Link, and was the third one voted off. In 2003, Payton and her daughter appeared on a Mother's Day episode of Lingo, playing against fellow TV mom Meredith Baxter and her daughter. Baxter and her daughter won. In 2005, Jo Marie Payton provided the voice of Suga Mama in The Proud Family Movie. Her other television credits include Desperate Housewives, Reba, Girlfriends, Wanda at Large, Judging Amy, The Parkers, Will & Grace, The Hughleys, 7th Heaven, Moesha, The Jamie Foxx Show, 227, Silver Spoons, Small Wonder and The New Odd Couple. She also appeared in the Canadian TV mini series The Rev as Mama. In 2005, Payton co-hosted the 15th Annual NAACP Theatre Awards with Glynn Turman. In August 2009, Payton appeared on Meet the Browns as Shirley Van Owen. Payton recently hosted her own show on the Hometeam Network, Second Chance with Jomarie Payton. In 2012, Payton was in the GMC TV movie special From This Day Forward.
 Passage 2:In 1543, Europeans reached Japan for the first time when a junk belonging to the Chinese wokou pirate lord Wang Zhi carrying Portuguese traders shipwrecked on Tanegashima. The Portuguese introduced the arquebus to the Japanese during this chance encounter, which gave the Japanese, undergoing the bloody Sengoku period at the time, a powerful weapon with which they conducted their internecine wars. The discovery of Japan was attractive to Portuguese merchants and missionaries alike, for it gave the merchants a new market to trade their goods, and the Jesuit missionaries eyed Japan for new converts into Christianity. The warlords of Kyushu vied to get the Portuguese carrack (called the black ship by the Japanese) into their harbours, since the ship also brought considerable wealth to their fiefdoms in addition to the guns.
 Passage 3:Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that "the musical scenes are the best rock coverage since 'Woodstock.' The sound is first rate, for one thing, and director Pierre Adidge has some idea of why Cocker electrifies a crowd." Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film a "most satisfying, record-album of a movie" which "patronizes neither its audience nor its stars ... It is uncluttered, one of the best concert films so far." A review in Variety said, "Considerable technical expertise has gone into this production, and though the objective may be clear, it just hasn't turned out to be another 'Woodstock,' possibly because Joe Cocker's personality isn't all that endearing." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune rated the film three stars out of four and wrote, "'Mad Dogs' is distinguishable from other 'rockumentaries' because it deals almost exclusively with the musician and his music. There are few side trips to cultural comments." Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times stated, "As a film, 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' is a good concert. For much of the picture's 114 minutes, the camera is on Joe Cocker, by most standards the best and most exciting singer in rock music ... But 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen,' unfortunately, fails in the end to rise above this interesting, but clearly limited historical summary of the Cocker tour. As a film, it doesn't establish its own importance." A negative review by Tom Zito of The Washington Post advised readers to "Forget the film and try the record," explaining, "What emerges from all this is roughly two hours of footage that looks terrible on the screen and sounds almost as bad. The film is projected in an annoying square format, except for the moments when the screen area is broken up into some poorly coordinated split-screen effects. The camerawork is often sloppy ... the whole thing winds up looking and sounding like a cheap, imitation (indoor) 'Woodstock.'" James D. White of The Monthly Film Bulletin declared that "The music itself is excellent," but "The film's information content is minimal; and one's heart sinks as the screen is split into a double image for the first number and as the mandatory shots—of excited fans, of joint-rolling in a hotel bedroom, of an interview with a vacuous groupie—are inevitably wheeled out."


SOLUTION: 3

PROBLEM: Question: How old was the military engineer who scouted around Leith during the siege? Passage 1:After completing his secondary education at Highgate School, he attended King's College, Cambridge, earning his PhD in theoretical (high-energy) particle physics in 1971. After brief post-doc positions at SLAC and Caltech, he went to CERN and has held an indefinite contract there since 1978. He was awarded the Maxwell Medal and the Paul Dirac Prize by the Institute of Physics in 1982 and 2005 respectively, and is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London since 1985 and of the Institute of Physics since 1991. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southampton, and twice won the First Award in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition (in 1999 and 2005). He is also Honorary Doctor at Uppsala University.
 Passage 2:The English King Henry VIII, angered by the Scots reneging on the initial agreement, made war on Scotland in 1544–1549, a period which the writer Sir Walter Scott later christened the "Rough Wooing". In May 1544 an English army landed at Granton and captured Leith to land heavy artillery for an assault on Edinburgh Castle, but withdrew after burning the town and the Palace of Holyrood over three days. Three years later, following another English invasion and victory at Pinkie Cleugh in 1547, the English attempted to establish a "pale" within Scotland. Leith was of prime strategic importance because of its vital role as Edinburgh's port, handling its foreign trade and essential supplies. The English arrived in Leith on 11 September 1547 and camped on Leith Links. The military engineer Richard Lee scouted around the town on 12 September looking to see if it could be made defensible. On 14 September the English began digging a trench on the south-east side of Leith near the Firth of Forth. William Patten wrote that the work was done as much for exercise as for defence, since the army only stayed for five days.
 Passage 3:Pieter van Laer (1599 – c. 1642) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre scenes, active for over a decade in Rome, where his nickname was Il Bamboccio. Artists working in his style, who often painted just such scenes of everyday life as Pliny lists, became known as the Bamboccianti, painters in Bamboccio's manner. Peiraikos is often mentioned in the controversies over the Bamboccianti, for example by Salvator Rosa in his Satires, and later by the Dutch biographer of artists, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten in his Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (Introduction to the Academy of Painting), Rotterdam 1678. As genre painting became an important element of Dutch Golden Age painting, Peiraikos was used to provide classical precedent for such work, in the relatively few discussions of the appropriateness of such art by Karel van Mander in his Schilder-boeck (1604) and Arnold Houbraken in his The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters (1718–1719). Having originally been often rather cheap, by the late 17th century the best Dutch genre scenes became sought after by collectors across Europe at very high prices, a development following Pliny's account of Peiraikos that was bemoaned by Lessing in his Laocoon (1763), mentioning Dutch painting specifically. 


SOLUTION: 2

PROBLEM: Question: How many episodes aired in the same season as "Lisa the Skeptic"? Passage 1:"Lisa the Skeptic" is the eighth episode of The Simpsons' ninth season. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 23, 1997. On an archaeological dig with her class, Lisa discovers a skeleton that resembles an angel. All of the townspeople believe that the skeleton actually came from an angel, but skeptical Lisa attempts to persuade them that there must be a rational scientific explanation. The episode's writer, David X. Cohen, developed the idea after visiting the American Museum of Natural History, and decided to loosely parallel themes from the Scopes Monkey Trial. The episode also makes allusions to actual hoaxes, such as the Cardiff Giant. 
 Passage 2:In November 1988, a new development team within Microsoft (which included former Digital Equipment Corporation developers Dave Cutler and Mark Lucovsky) began work on a revamped version of IBM and Microsoft's OS/2 operating system known as "NT OS/2". NT OS/2 was intended to be a secure, multi-user operating system with POSIX compatibility and a modular, portable kernel with preemptive multitasking and support for multiple processor architectures. However, following the successful release of Windows 3.0, the NT development team decided to rework the project to use an extended 32-bit port of the Windows API known as Win32 instead of those of OS/2. Win32 maintained a similar structure to the Windows APIs (allowing existing Windows applications to easily be ported to the platform), but also supported the capabilities of the existing NT kernel. Following its approval by Microsoft's staff, development continued on what was now Windows NT, the first 32-bit version of Windows. However, IBM objected to the changes, and ultimately continued OS/2 development on its own.
 Passage 3:In the world of sports, mascots are also used for merchandising. Team mascots are often related to their respective team nicknames. This is especially true when the team's nickname is something that is a living animal and/or can be made to have humanlike characteristics. For more abstract nicknames, the team may opt to have an unrelated character serve as the mascot. For example, the athletic teams of the University of Alabama are nicknamed the Crimson Tide, while their mascot is an elephant named Big Al. Team mascots may take the form of a logo, person, live animal, inanimate object, or a costumed character, and often appear at team matches and other related events, sports mascots are often used as marketing tools for their teams to children. Since the mid-20th century, costumed characters have provided teams with an opportunity to choose a fantasy creature as their mascot, as is the case with the Philadelphia Phillies' mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, and the Philadelphia Flyers' mascot, Gritty.


SOLUTION:
1