TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.
PROBLEM: Passage: The story starts in sequence with 16-year-old Alison Findlay and her two friends playing a seemingly innocent ouija board game. Upon contacting a spirit, who is later revealed to be Alison's dead father (she never knew her actual parents), the girls discover that Alison is in danger. The spirit then possesses one of the girls and warns her not to return home for her 19th birthday. The girl is immediately killed after a bookcase collapses onto her.

SOLUTION: What took Alison's friend's life?

PROBLEM: Passage: Brought up in poverty, hotel manicurist Regi Allen wants to marry a rich husband. Her new client, wheelchair-using hotel guest Allen Macklyn is immediately attracted to her and becomes her confidant. Despite his obvious wealth, Regi does not view him as a potential husband, and has no qualms about telling him about her goal in life.
Exiting his penthouse suite, she encounters a man playing hop-scotch in the hallway, and declines his invitation to join him.  He makes an appointment for a manicure as Theodore Drew III, scion of a socially prominent family. Unaware that the Drews were bankrupted by the Great Depression, she accepts his invitation to dinner.
They have a good time, but Ted drinks too much and tells Regi that he is engaged to Vivian Snowden, heiress to a pineapple fortune. When Regi is unable to wake him from his drunken slumber, she lets him sleep on her sofa. He explains to her that he was supposed to sail to Bermuda last night (a trip paid for by his future father-in-law) and that he has nowhere to stay and no money.  Regi reluctantly lets him live in her apartment until his boat returns from Bermuda, at which time he can return to sponging off of Vivian.  Ted and Regi confess to each other that they intend to marry for money.
Ted and Regi play fun pranks on each other.  In the first one, Ted frightens away Regi's date by pretending to be her abusive husband.  Later, in order to convince Vivian that he is in Bermuda, Ted persuades Regi to telephone Vivian while posing as a Bermuda telephone operator. When Regi repeatedly interrupts in a nasally voice, Ted hangs up to avoid laughing in his fiancee's hearing. However, this backfires, as Vivian discovers that the call came from New York when she tries to reconnect. She hires private investigators to find out what is going on.

SOLUTION: What's the full name of the person the man in the wheelchair is attracted to?

PROBLEM: Passage: Balakirev's despotism strained the relationship between him and Tchaikovsky but both men still appreciated each other's abilities. Despite their friction, Balakirev proved the only man to persuade Tchaikovsky to rewrite a work several times, as he would with Romeo and Juliet. At Balakirev's suggestion, Tchaikovsky based the work on Balakirev's King Lear, a tragic overture in sonata form after the example of Beethoven's concert overtures. It was Tchaikovsky's idea to reduce the plot to one central conflict and represent it musically with the binary structure of sonata form. However, the execution of that plot in the music we know today came only after two radical revisions. Balakirev discarded many of the early drafts Tchaikovsky sent him and, with the flurry of suggestions between the two men, the piece was constantly in the mail between Moscow and Saint Petersburg.Tchaikovsky allowed the first version to be premiered by Nikolai Rubinstein on March 16, 1870, after the composer had incorporated only some of Balakirev's suggestions. The premiere was a disaster. Stung by this rejection, Tchaikovsky took Balakirev's strictures to heart. He forced himself to reach beyond his musical training and rewrote much of the music into the form we know it today. Romeo would bring Tchaikovsky his first national and international acclaim and become a work the kuchka lauded unconditionally. On hearing the love theme from Romeo, Stasov told the group, "There were five of you; now there are six". Such was the enthusiasm of the Five for Romeo that at their gatherings Balakirev was always asked to play it through at the piano. He did this so many times that he learned to perform it from memory.Some critics, among them Tchaikovsky biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, have wondered what would have happened if Tchaikovsky had joined Balakirev in 1862 instead of attending the Conservatory. They suggest that he might have developed much more quickly as an independent composer, and offer as proof the fact that Tchaikovsky did not write his first wholly distinct work until Balakirev goaded and inspired him to write Romeo. How well Tchaikovsky might have developed in the long run is another matter. He owed much of his musical ability, including his skill at orchestration, to the thorough grounding in counterpoint, harmony and musical theory he received at the Conservatory. Without that grounding, Tchaikovsky might not have been able to write what would become his greatest works.

SOLUTION:
What were the last names of the two men who still appreciated each other's abilities?