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: After leaving the army in January 1919, Grainger refused an offer to become conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and  resumed his career as a concert pianist.  He  was soon performing around 120 concerts a year, generally to great critical acclaim, and in  April 1921 reached a wider audience by performing in a cinema, New York's Capitol Theatre. Grainger  commented that the huge audiences at these cinema concerts often showed greater appreciation for his playing than those at established concert venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Aeolian. In the summer of 1919 he led a course in piano technique at Chicago Musical College, the first of many such educational duties he would undertake in later years.Amid his concert and teaching duties, Grainger found time to re-score many of his works (a habit he continued throughout his life) and also to compose new pieces: his Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away, and the orchestral version of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart both originated in this period.   He also began to develop the technique of elastic scoring, a form of flexible orchestration  which enabled works to be  performed by different numbers of players and instrument types, from small chamber groups  up to full orchestral strength.In April 1921 Grainger moved with his mother to a large house in White Plains, New York. This was  his  home for the remainder of his life. From the beginning of 1922 Rose's health deteriorated sharply; she was suffering from  delusions and nightmares, and became  fearful that her illness would harm her son's career. Because of the closeness of the bond between the two, there had long been  rumours that  their relationship was incestuous;  in April 1922 Rose was directly challenged over this issue by her friend Lotta Hough. From her last letter to Grainger, dated 29 April, it seems that this confrontation unbalanced Rose; on 30 April, while Grainger was touring on the West Coast, she jumped to her death from an office window  on the 18th floor of the Aeolian Building in New York City. The letter, which began "I am out of my mind and cannot think properly", asked Grainger if he had ever spoken to Lotta of "improper love". She signed the letter: "Your poor insane mother".

SOLUTION: What is the name of the individual who jumped to her death from on office window on the 18th floor of the Aeollian building?

PROBLEM: Passage: In December 1775, Cletus Moyer is a free black Northerner in colonial America, working with a pre-Underground Railroad network to help slaves escape captivity. In the days just prior to Christmas, a group of bounty hunters led by Hattie Carraway captures Moyer near the Parker plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Because of his capture, dozens of slaves who have already left their plantations in escape attempts are in danger of being captured as well. Moyer implores two slaves from the nearby Reynolds plantation to take his place: Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka in his mid-twenties who was captured in what is now the Gambia, and Fiddler, an elderly man who was born into slavery. Kunta is eager to help (and to escape himself), but Fiddler is unwilling, fearful of the consequences if they are caught.
After an unsuccessful slave revolt elsewhere in the colony, Moyer and two slaves are hanged by Carraway's men on Christmas Eve, prompting Fiddler to set aside his fear and help Kunta lead the runaway slaves to freedom. Although the pair successfully leads the runaways that night to their next stop on the escape route (a boat waiting at the river) there is only room for one of them, and since neither one wants to go without the other, they both decide to stay.  That choice forces them to return to the Parker plantation and manufacture an excuse for their temporary absence. Nevertheless, Kunta and Fiddler are left with the satisfaction of knowing that they helped to give a group of fellow slaves the best Christmas gift of all: freedom.

SOLUTION: What's the first name of the person who dies the day before Christmas?

PROBLEM: Passage: Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual decipherment, the ancient Egyptian language and script had not been understood since shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire. The usage of the hieroglyphic script had become increasingly specialised even in the later Pharaonic period; by the 4th century AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading them. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is dated to 24 August 394, found at Philae and known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom.Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance, and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the Greek and Roman alphabets. In the 5th century, the priest Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphica, an explanation of almost 200 glyphs. His work was believed to be authoritative, yet it was misleading in many ways, and this and other works were a lasting impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts at decipherment were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time. The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Georg Zoëga in the 18th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx.

SOLUTION:
What were the names of the three European scholars who continued to study hieroglyphs with fruitless attempts at decipherment?