[Q]: Read the following paragraph and extract the answer for the question: Who is the cynical bridesmaid's cousin?  Annie Walker is a single woman in her mid-thirties, living in Milwaukee. Following the failure of her bakery due to the recession, her boyfriend left her, and she lost her savings, forcing her to take a job as a sales clerk in a jewelry store and share an apartment with an English immigrant roommate Gil and his sister Brynn. Her business failure was so painful that she has given up baking entirely. Annie has a no-strings-attached sexual relationship with the self-absorbed Ted, but she hopes for something more from him. Her best friend, Lillian, is virtually her only source of happiness. Lillian becomes engaged and asks Annie to be her maid of honor. At the engagement party, Annie meets Lillian's bridesmaids: cynical, worldly, long-married cousin Rita; naïve and idealistic newlywed friend from work Becca; the groom's decidedly unfiltered sister Megan; and Helen, the rich, beautiful, and elite wife of the groom's boss. Helen and Annie, who are jealous of each other's friendship with Lillian, take an instant dislike to each other, but Lillian persuades them to spend time together.
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[A]: Lillian


[Q]: Read the following paragraph and extract the answer for the question: What was crushed and sank?  The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Amundsen's South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton's words, the “one great main object of Antarctic journeyings”.  The expedition failed to accomplish this objective, but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance. Shackleton had served in the Antarctic on the Discovery Expedition of 1901–1904, and had led the Nimrod Expedition of 1907–1909. In this new venture he proposed to sail to the Weddell Sea and to land a shore party near Vahsel Bay, in preparation for a transcontinental march via the South Pole to the Ross Sea. A supporting group, the Ross Sea party, would meanwhile establish camp in McMurdo Sound, and from there lay a series of supply depots across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. These depots would be essential for the transcontinental party's survival, as the group would not be able to carry enough provisions for the entire crossing. The expedition required two ships: Endurance under Shackleton for the Weddell Sea party, and Aurora, under Aeneas Mackintosh, for the Ross Sea party. Endurance became beset in the ice of the Weddell Sea before reaching Vahsel Bay, and drifted northward, held in the pack ice, throughout the Antarctic winter of 1915. Eventually the ship was crushed and sunk, stranding its 28-man complement on the ice. After months spent in makeshift camps as the ice continued its northwards drift, the party took to the lifeboats to reach the inhospitable, uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton and five others then made an 800-mile (1,300 km) open-boat journey in the James Caird to reach South Georgia. From there, Shackleton was eventually able to mount a rescue of the men waiting on Elephant Island and bring them home without loss of life. On the other...
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[A]: Endurance


[Q]: Read the following paragraph and extract the answer for the question: What is the full name of the persont that painted Charles IV of Spain and His Family?  In 1692, the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano  became one of the few allowed to view paintings held in Philip IV's private apartments, and was greatly impressed by Las Meninas. Giordano described the work as the "theology of painting", and was inspired to paint A Homage to Velázquez (National Gallery, London). By the early 18th century his oeuvre was gaining international recognition, and later in the century British collectors ventured to Spain in search of acquisitions. Since the popularity of Italian art was then at its height among British connoisseurs, they concentrated on paintings that showed obvious Italian influence, largely ignoring others such as Las Meninas.An almost immediate influence can be seen in the two portraits by Mazo of subjects depicted in Las Meninas, which in some ways reverse the motif of that painting. Ten years later, in 1666, Mazo painted Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was then 15 and just about to leave Madrid to marry the Holy Roman Emperor. In the background are figures in two further receding doorways, one of which was the new King Charles (Margaret Theresa's brother), and another the dwarf Maribarbola. A Mazo portrait of the widowed Queen Mariana again shows, through a doorway in the Alcázar, the young king with dwarfs, possibly including Maribarbola, and attendants who offer him a drink.  Mazo's painting of The Family of the Artist also shows a composition similar to that of Las Meninas. Francisco Goya etched a print of Las Meninas in 1778, and later used Velázquez's painting as the model for his Charles IV of Spain and His Family. As in Las Meninas, the royal family in Goya's work is apparently visiting the artist's studio. In both paintings the artist is shown working on a canvas, of which only the rear is visible. Goya, however, replaces the atmospheric and warm perspective of Las Meninas with what Pierre Gassier calls a sense of "imminent suffocation". Goya's royal family is presented on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim...
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[A]:
Francisco Goya