TASK DEFINITION: You will be given a summary of a story. You need to create a question that can be answered from the story. You can create a question about characters, events, facts and beliefs, etc. Your question should be specific, try not to use pronouns instead of full names. As the stories are sometimes movie plots, they will contain actor names in parentheses. You should not use those names. Only use character names. Try to ask a question about all parts of the plot, not just the beginning.
PROBLEM:  At Will s wedding party, Edward Bloom recalls the day Will was born, claiming he caught an enormous catfish using his wedding ring as bait. Will, having heard these stories all his life, believes them to be lies and falls out with his father. Three years later, Edward is stricken with cancer, so Will and his pregnant French wife Jos phine return to his childhood home in Alabama to spend time with his father. Edward s life is told through flashbacks, beginning with his encounter with a witch in his hometown, Ashland. She shows him his death but he reacts to it without fear. As he grows into adulthood, he finds his home too confining, and sets out into the world with a misunderstood giant, Karl, who has come to town with a traveling circus.
Edward and Karl find a fork in the road and travel down separate paths. Edward follows a path through a swamp and discovers the secret town of Spectre, the cheery locals claiming he was expected. There, he befriends Ashton poet Norther Winslow and the mayor s daughter Jenny. However, Edward leaves Spectre, unwilling to settle down but promises Jenny he will return. In the present day, Jos phine speaks to the bed-ridden Edward and asks him to tell her the story of how he met his wife Sandra, with Will listening outside the door. Returning to his reminisces, Edward reunites with Karl and they visit the Calloway Circus, where Edward falls in love with a beautiful woman. Karl and Edward get jobs in the circus where the ringmaster Amos Calloway reveals to Edward one detail about the woman at the end of every month.
Three years later, Edward discovers that Amos is secretly a werewolf but shows no ill-will towards his employer. Amos, upon returning to normal, reveals the woman is Sandra, and she attends Auburn University. Edward confesses his love to Sandra, but she declines his wedding proposal despite numerous romantic gestures. He then learns she is already engaged to Don Price, a fellow Ashton citizen. Don beats Edward in a fight, prompting Sandra to break off their engagement and marry Edward. Shortly after, Edward is conscripted into the army and sent to fight in the Korean War. He parachutes into the middle of a North Korean military show, steals important documents, and convinces Siamese twins Ping and Jing to help him go home in exchange for making them celebrities.
Upon returning home, Edward becomes a travelling salesman and crosses paths with Winslow, unwittingly helping him rob a failing bank, inspiring the poet to work on Wall Street. In the present, Will investigates the truth behind his father s tales and travels to Spectre. He meets an older Jenny, who explains that Edward rescued the town from bankruptcy and rebuilt it with help from his friends from Calloway Circus. Will suggests that Jenny had an affair with his father, but she reveals while she loved Edward, he remained loyal to Sandra. Will returns home but learns Edward has had a stroke and stays with him at the hospital.
Edward wakes up but, unable to speak much, asks Will to narrate how his life ends. Though struggling, Will tells his father of their imagined daring escape from the hospital to the nearby lake, where everyone from Edward s past is there to see him off. Will takes Edward into the river, where he transforms into the giant catfish and swims away. A satisfied Edward dies, knowing Will understands his love for storytelling. At the funeral, Will and Jos phine are surprised when all the people from Edward s stories come to the service, though each one is a slightly less fantastical version than described. Will, finally understanding his father s love for life, passes on Edward s stories to his own son.

SOLUTION: Why does Will patch things up with his dad three years later?

PROBLEM:  Karsten Bernick is the dominant businessman in a small coastal town in Norway, with interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. Now he is planning his most ambitious project yet, backing a railway which will connect the town to the main line and open a fertile valley which he has been secretly buying up.
Suddenly his past explodes on him. Johan T nnesen, his wife's younger brother comes back from America to the town he ran away from 15 years ago. At the time it was thought he had run off with money from the Bernick family business and with the urge to avoid scandal because he was having an affair with an actress. But none of this was true. He left town to take the blame for Bernick, who was the one who had actually been having the affair and was nearly caught with the actress. There was no money to take since at the time the Bernick firm had been almost bankrupt.
With T nnesen comes his half-sister Lona (whom Ibsen is said to have modelled after Norwegian feminist Aasta Hansteen), who once loved and was loved by Bernick. He rejected her and married his current wife for money so that he could rebuild the family business. In the years since T nnesen left, the town has built ever greater rumours of his wickedness, helped by Bernick's studious refusal to give any indication of the truth.
This mixture only needs a spark to explode and it gets one when T nnesen falls in love with Dina Dorf, a young girl who is the daughter of the actress involved in the scandal of 15 years ago and who now lives as a charity case in the Bernick household. He demands that Bernick tell the girl the truth. Bernick refuses. T nnesen says he will go back to the US to clear up his affairs and then come back to town to marry Dina. Bernick sees his chance to get out of his mess. His yard is repairing an American ship, The Indian Girl, which is dangerously unseaworthy. He orders his yard foreman to finish the work by the next day, even if it means sending the ship and its crew to certain death because he wants T nnesen to die on board. That way he will be free of any danger in the future. Things do not work out like that. T nnesen runs off with Dina on board another ship which is safe, leaving word that he will be back. And Bernick's young son stows away on the Indian Girl, seemingly heading for certain death.
Bernick discovers that his plot has gone disastrously wrong on the night the people of the town have lined up to honour him for his contribution to the city.
It is all set up for a tragic conclusion, but suddenly Ibsen pulls back from the brink. The yard foreman gets an attack of conscience and rows out to stop the Indian Girl from heading to sea and death; Bernick's son is brought back safely by his mother; and Bernick addresses the community, tells them most of the truth and gets away with it. His wife greets the news that he only married her for money as a sign there is now hope for their marriage.

SOLUTION: Why there was no money?

PROBLEM:  Almayer s Folly is about a poor businessman who dreams of finding a hidden gold mine and becoming very wealthy. He is a white European, married to a native Malayan; they have one daughter named Nina. He fails to find the goldmine, and comes home saddened. Previously, he had heard that the British were to conquer the Pantai River, and he had built a large, lavish house near where he resided at the time, in order to welcome the invading country to the native land. However, the conquest never took place, and the house remained unfinished. Some passing Dutch seamen had called the house  Almayer s Folly . Now, Almayer continually goes out for long trips, but eventually he stops doing so and stays home with his hopeless daydreams of riches and splendor. His native wife loathes him for this.
One day, a Malayan prince, Dain Maroola, came to see Almayer about trading, and while there he falls in love with Nina. Mrs. Almayer kept arranging meetings for Nina and Dain. She wanted them to marry so her daughter could stay native, because she was highly distrustful of the white men and their ways. Dain left but vowed to return to help Almayer find the gold mine. When he does return, he goes straight to Lakamba, a Malayan rajah, and told him that he found the gold mine and that some Dutchmen had captured his ship. The rajah tells him to kill Almayer before the Dutch arrive because he is not needed to find the gold now. The following morning, an unidentifiable native corpse is found floating in the river, wearing an ankle bracelet very similar to Dain s. Almayer was distraught because Dain was his only chance at finding the secret mine. (The corpse was actually of his slave, who had died when a canoe overturned. Mrs. Almayer suggested that Dain put his anklet and ring on the body.)
Mrs. Almayer planned to smuggle Dain away from the Dutch, so he would not be arrested. She snuck Nina away from her father, who was drinking with the Dutch. When he awoke from his drunken stupor, a native slave girl told him where Nina had run away to, and Almayer tracked her to Dain s hiding place. Nina refused to go back to avoid the slurs of all the white society. During all this arguing, the slave girl had informed the Dutch of Dain s whereabouts. Almayer said that he could never forgive Nina but would help them escape by taking them to the mouth of the river, where a canoe would rescue them from the Dutch. After they had escaped, Almayer erased the lover s footprints, and went back to his house. Mrs. Almayer ran away to the rajah for protection, taking all Dain s dowry with her. All alone, Almayer broke all his furniture in his home office, piled it in the center of the room, and burned it, along with his entire house, to the ground. He spent the rest of his days in  [His] Folly , where he began smoking opium to forget his daughter. He eventually died there.

SOLUTION:
Why did Mrs. Almayer want her daughter to marry Dain?

