1{2 "document_id": "lb_2wikimqa_81c8cd41355e5f0489dad4010b5fd414b817f7a9134affc2",3 "family": "public_2wikimqa",4 "split": "dev",5 "text": "Passage 1:\nJohn McMahon (Surrey and Somerset cricketer)\nJohn William Joseph McMahon (28 December 1917 – 8 May 2001) was an Australian-born first-class cricketer who played for Surrey and Somerset County Cricket Clubs in England from 1947 to 1957.\n\nSurrey cricketer\nMcMahon was an orthodox left-arm spin bowler with much variation in speed and flight who was spotted by Surrey playing in club cricket in North London and brought on to the county's staff for the 1947 season at the age of 29. In the first innings of his first match, against Lancashire at The Oval, he took five wickets for 81 runs.In his first full season, 1948, he was Surrey's leading wicket-taker and in the last home game of the season he was awarded his county cap – he celebrated by taking eight Northamptonshire wickets for 46 runs at The Oval, six of them coming in the space of 6.3 overs for seven runs. This would remain the best bowling performance of his first-class career, not surpassed, but he did equal it seven years later. In the following game, the last away match of the season, he took 10 Hampshire wickets for 150 runs in the match at Bournemouth. In the 1948 season as a whole, he took 91 wickets at an average of 28.07. As a tail-end left-handed batsman, he managed just 93 runs in the season at an average of 4.22.The emergence of Tony Lock as a slow left-arm bowler in 1949 brought a stuttering end of McMahon's Surrey career. Though he played in 12 first-class matches in the 1949 season, McMahon took only 19 wickets; a similar number of matches in 1950 brought 34 wickets. In 1951, he played just seven times and in 1952 only three times. In 1953, Lock split the first finger of his left hand, and played in only 11 of Surrey's County Championship matches; McMahon played as his deputy in 14 Championship matches, though a measure of their comparative merits was that Lock's 11 games produced 67 wickets at 12.38 runs apiece, while McMahon's 14 games brought him 45 wickets at the, for him, low average of 21.53. At the end of the 1953 season, McMahon was allowed to leave Surrey to join Somerset, then languishing at the foot of the County Championship and recruiting widely from other counties and other countries.\n\nSomerset cricketer\nSomerset's slow bowling in 1954 was in the hands of leg-spinner Johnny Lawrence, with support from the off-spin of Jim Hilton while promising off-spinner Brian Langford was on national service. McMahon filled a vacancy for a left-arm orthodox spinner that had been there since the retirement of Horace Hazell at the end of the 1952 season; Hazell's apparent successor, Roy Smith, had failed to realise his promise as a bowler in 1953, though his batting had advanced significantly.\nMcMahon instantly became a first-team regular and played in almost every match during his four years with the county, not missing a single Championship game until he was controversially dropped from the side in August 1957, after which he did not play in the Championship again.In the 1954 season, McMahon, alongside fellow newcomer Hilton, was something of a disappointment, according to Wisden: \"The new spin bowlers, McMahon and Hilton, did not attain to the best standards of their craft in a wet summer, yet, like the rest of the attack, they would have fared better with reasonable support in the field and from their own batsmen,\" it said. McMahon took 85 wickets at an average of 27.47 (Hilton took only 42 at a higher average). His best match was against Essex at Weston-super-Mare where he took six for 96 in the first innings and five for 45 in the second to finish with match figures of 11 for 141, which were the best of his career. He was awarded his county cap in the 1954 season, but Somerset remained at the bottom of the table.\nThe figures for the 1955 were similar: McMahon this time took 75 wickets at 28.77 apiece. There was a small improvement in his batting and the arrival of Bryan Lobb elevated McMahon to No 10 in the batting order for most of the season, and he responded with 262 runs and an average of 9.03. This included his highest-ever score, 24, made in the match against Sussex at Frome. A week later in Somerset's next match, he equalled his best-ever bowling performance, taking eight Kent wickets for 46 runs in the first innings of a match at Yeovil through what Wisden called \"clever variation of flight and spin\". These matches brought two victories for Somerset, but there were only two others in the 1955 season and the side finished at the bottom of the Championship for the fourth season running.At the end of the 1955 season, Lawrence retired and McMahon became Somerset's senior spin bowler for the 1956 season, with Langford returning from National Service as the main support. McMahon responded with his most successful season so far, taking 103 wickets at an average of 25.57, the only season in his career in which he exceeded 100 wickets. The bowling average improved still further in 1957 to 23.10 when McMahon took 86 wickets. But his season came to an abrupt end in mid-August 1957 when, after 108 consecutive Championship matches, he was dropped from the first team during the Weston-super-Mare festival. Though he played some games for the second eleven later in August, he regained his place in the first team for only a single end-of-season friendly match, and he was told that his services were not required for the future, a decision, said Wisden, that \"proved highly controversial\".\n\nSacked by Somerset\nThe reason behind McMahon's sacking did not become public knowledge for many years. In its obituary of him in 2002, McMahon was described by Wisden as \"a man who embraced the antipodean virtues of candour and conviviality\". It went on: \"Legend tells of a night at the Flying Horse Inn in Nottingham when he beheaded the gladioli with an ornamental sword, crying: 'When Mac drinks, everybody drinks!'\" The obituary recounts a further escapade in second eleven match at Midsomer Norton where a curfew imposed on the team was circumvented by \"a POW-type loop\" organised by McMahon, \"with his team-mates escaping through a ground-storey window and then presenting themselves again\". As the only Somerset second eleven match that McMahon played in at Midsomer Norton was right at the end of the 1957 season, this may have been the final straw. But in any case there had been \"an embarrassing episode at Swansea's Grand Hotel\" earlier in the season, also involving Jim Hilton, who was also dismissed at the end of the season. Team-mates and club members petitioned for McMahon to be reinstated, but the county club was not to be moved.\nAfter a period in Lancashire League cricket with Milnrow Cricket Club, McMahon moved back to London where he did office work, later contributing some articles to cricket magazines.\n\n\n== Notes and references ==\nPassage 2:\nVytautas Straižys\nVytautas Straižys (20 August 1936 – 19 December 2021) was a Lithuanian astronomer. In 1963–65 he and his collaborators created and developed the Vilnius photometric system, a seven-color intermediate band system, optimized for photometric stellar classification. In 1996 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. Straižys was an editor of the journal Baltic Astronomy. He spent a lot of time working at the Molėtai Astronomical Observatory. Asteroid 68730 Straizys in 2002 was named after him.\n\nEarly life and professional history\nStraižys was born in Utena on 20 August 1936. In 1959, he graduated from Vilnius University in astrophysics. In 1959–62, he was a graduate student of the Institute of Physics and Mathematics of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. In 1962–67, he was a scientific researcher at the same institute. From 1967 to 1990, he headed the Astrophysical Department of the Institute of Physics, Vilnius. In 1990–2003, he was the head of the Astronomical Observatory of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy of Vilnius University. In 1991–96 Associate Director of the same Institute. In 2003, he became a chief researcher. In 2013, he became a professor emeritus. In 1992–93 academic year: visiting professor in Union College, Schenectady, New York.\n\nScientific activity\nMain directions of the scientific research: multicolor photometry of stars, stellar physical parameters, stellar classification, interstellar extinction, interstellar clouds, star clusters, Galactic structure. One of the authors of the Vilnius photometric system for the classification of stars. In 1969–90 conducted the construction of the Molėtai Observatory in Lithuania and the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan. He was author of 324 scientific papers published between 1957 and 2009 and of three monographs: Multicolor Stellar Photometry (Vilnius, 1977, in Russian), Metal-Deficient Stars (Vilnius, 1982, in Russian) and Multicolor Stellar Photometry (Tucson, Arizona, 1992 and 1995, revised version, in English). From 1977 to 1991 he was editor of the Bulletin of the Vilnius Astronomical Observatory, from 1992 to 2021 editor of an international journal Baltic Astronomy. Scientific adviser of 22 doctoral dissertations.\n\nPersonal life and death\nStraižys died on 19 December 2021, at the age of 85.\n\nMembership\nInternational Astronomical Union (IAU, 1967)\nInstitute for Space Observations, New York (1988)\nEuropean Astronomical Society (EAS, 1990)\nAmerican Astronomical Society (AAS, 1991)\nAstronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP, 1991)\nAmerican Planetary Society (1991)\nAstronomical Society of New York (1992)\nLithuanian Astronomical Union (president 1995–2003)\nVice-President and President of the IAU Commission on Stellar Classification (1979–85)\nExpert Member (1991–95) and Corresponding Member (since 1996) of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences\n\nHonours\nAwards\n\nLithuanian Republic Science Award (1973)\nNomination as a distinguished scientist of Lithuania (1986)\nChretien Grant of the American Astronomical Society (2000)\nOrder of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, Officer's Cross (2003)\nLithuanian National Science Award (2004)Named after him\n\nAsteroid 68730 Straizys\n\nPublications\nV. Straizys, Multicolor Stellar Photometry (in Russian), Mokslas Publishers, Vilnius, Lithuania, 1977\nV. Straizys, Metal-Deficient Stars (in Russian), Mokslas Publishers, Vilnius, Lithuania, 1982\nV. Straizys, Multicolor Stellar Photometry (in English), Pachart Publishing House, Tucson, Arizona, 1992 (2nd publication in 1995)\nV. Straizys, The Milky Way (in Lithuanian), Mokslas Publishers, 1992\nV. Straizys, Astronomy, 1993 (a textbook for secondary schools, in Lithuanian)\nA. Azusienis, A. Pucinskas, V. Straizys, Astronomy, 1995 (a textbook for universities, in Lithuanian, 2nd revised publication in 2003)\nV. Straizys, Astronomical Encyclopedic Dictionary (in Lithuanian), Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, 2002 (2nd publication in 2003)\nPassage 3:\nJohn Allen (Oxford University cricketer)\nJohn Aubrey Allen (born 19 July 1974) is an Australian teacher, rugby player and cricketer.Allen was born in Windsor, New South Wales. He attended Bede Polding College in South Windsor, before graduating with a BA in human movement studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where he also completed his Diploma of Education. He played rugby for several clubs, most notably for the Brumbies who he represented in the Ricoh Championship. He also played Grade cricket for Hawkesbury Cricket Club near Sydney. At 21, he moved to England to study for his master's degree at University College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Allen was awarded his blue in rugby union and cricket.Allen played as a centre in rugby union and as a forward in rugby league. He captained Oxford University RFC in 2003, leading the team to a draw in The Varsity Match against Cambridge at Twickenham in December that year. Earlier in the year, he scored a try late in the game to seal Oxford's victory in the Rugby League Varsity Match at the Athletic Ground, Richmond.For Oxford University Cricket Club, he played in two first-class matches, including the varsity match.After completing his master's, Allen returned to teaching in Australia and in 2017 was working as Director of Sport and Co-Curricular at Trinity Grammar School in Sydney, New South Wales.\nPassage 4:\nHenry Moore (cricketer)\nHenry Walter Moore (1849 – 20 August 1916) was an English-born first-class cricketer who spent most of his life in New Zealand.\n\nLife and family\nHenry Moore was born in Cranbrook, Kent, in 1849. He was the son of the Reverend Edward Moore and Lady Harriet Janet Sarah Montagu-Scott, who was one of the daughters of the 4th Duke of Buccleuch. One of his brothers, Arthur, became an admiral and was knighted. Their great \ngrandfather was John Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1783 to 1805. One of their sisters was a maid of honour to Queen Victoria.Moore went to New Zealand in the 1870s and lived in Geraldine and Christchurch. He married Henrietta Lysaght of Hāwera in November 1879, and they had one son. In May 1884 she died a few days after giving birth to a daughter, who also died.In 1886 Moore became a Justice of the Peace in Geraldine. In 1897 he married Alice Fish of Geraldine. They moved to England four years before his death in 1916.\n\nCricket career\nMoore was a right-handed middle-order batsman. In consecutive seasons, 1876–77 and 1877–78, playing for Canterbury, he made the highest score in the short New Zealand first-class season: 76 and 75 respectively. His 76 came in his first match for Canterbury, against Otago. He went to the wicket early on the first day with the score at 7 for 2 and put on 99 for the third wicket with Charles Corfe before he was out with the score at 106 for 3 after a \"very fine exhibition of free hitting, combined with good defence\". Canterbury were all out for 133, but went on to win the match. His 75 came in the next season's match against Otago, when he took the score from 22 for 2 to 136 for 6. The New Zealand cricket historian Tom Reese said, \"Right from the beginning he smote the bowling hip and thigh, going out of his ground to indulge in some forceful driving.\" Canterbury won again.Moore led the batting averages in the Canterbury Cricket Association in 1877–78 with 379 runs at an average of 34.4. Also in 1877–78, he was a member of the Canterbury team that inflicted the only defeat on the touring Australians. In 1896–97, at the age of 47, he top-scored in each innings for a South Canterbury XVIII against the touring Queensland cricket team.\nPassage 5:\nWale Adebanwi\nWale Adebanwi (born 1969) is a Nigerian-born first Black Rhodes Professor at St Antony's College, Oxford where he was, until June 2021, a Professor of Race Relations, and the Director of the African Studies Centre, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and a Governing Board Fellow. He is currently a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Adebanwi's research focuses on a range of topics in the areas of social change, nationalism and ethnicity, race relations, identity politics, elites and cultural politics, democratic process, newspaper press and spatial politics in Africa.\n\nEducation background\nWale Adebanwi graduated with a first degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, and later earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Ibadan. He also has an MPhil. and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.\n\nCareer\nAdebanwi worked as a freelance reporter, writer, journalist and editor for many newspapers and magazines before he joined the University of Ibadan's Department of Political Science as a lecturer and researcher. He was later appointed as an assistant professor in the African American and African Studies Department of the University of California, Davis, USA. He became a full professor at UC Davis in 2016.Adebanwi is the co-editor of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.\n\nWorks\nHis published works include:\nNation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press, 2016)\nYoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2014)\nAuthority Stealing: Anti-corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012)In addition, he is the editor and co-editor of other books, including.\n\nThe Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins (James Currey Publishers, 2017)\nWriters and Social Thought in Africa (Routledge, 2016)\n(co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Governance and the Crisis of Rule in Contemporary Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)\n(co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria: Critical Interpretations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).\n(co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Nigeria at Fifty: The Nation in Narration (Routledge, 2012)\n(co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Encountering the Nigerian State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).\n\nAwards\nRhodes Professorship in Race Relations awarded by Oxford University to Faculty of African and Interdisciplinary Area Studies.\nPassage 6:\nMirjam Polkunen\nMaire Mirjam Polkunen (2 March 1926 – 22 June 2012) was a Finnish writer, literature researcher, translator and dramatist. Among other awards, she won the Eino Leino Prize in 1969. Her Finnish rendering of Zeno's Conscience was awarded with the Mikael Agricola Prize in 1972.\nPassage 7:\nHartley Lobban\nHartley W Lobban (9 May 1926 – 15 October 2004) was a Jamaican-born first-class cricketer who played 17 matches for Worcestershire in the early 1950s.\n\nLife and career\nLobban played little cricket in Jamaica. He went to England at the end of World War II as a member of the Royal Air Force, and settled in Kidderminster in Worcestershire in 1947, where he worked as a civilian lorry driver for the RAF. He began playing for Kidderminster Cricket Club in the Birmingham League, and at the start of the 1952 season, opening the bowling for the club's senior team, he had figures of 7 for 9 and 7 for 37.Worcestershire invited him to play for them, and he made his first-class debut against Sussex in July 1952. He took five wickets in the match (his maiden victim being Ken Suttle) and then held on for 4 not out with Peter Richardson (20 not out) to add the 12 runs needed for a one-wicket victory after his county had collapsed from 192 for 2 to 238 for 9. A week later he claimed four wickets against Warwickshire, then a few days later still he managed 6 for 52 (five of his victims bowled) in what was otherwise a disastrous innings defeat to Derbyshire. In the last match of the season he took a career-best 6 for 51 against Glamorgan; he and Reg Perks (4 for 59) bowled unchanged throughout the first innings. Worcestershire won the game and Lobban finished the season with 23 wickets at 23.69.He took 23 wickets again in 1953, but at a considerably worse average of 34.43, and had only two really successful games: against Oxford University in June, when he took 5 for 70, and then against Sussex in July. On this occasion Lobban claimed eight wickets, his most in a match, including 6 for 103 in the first innings. He also made his highest score with the bat, 18, but Sussex won by five wickets.In 1954 Lobban made only two first-class appearances, and managed only the single wicket of Gloucestershire tail-ender Bomber Wells. In his final game, against Warwickshire at Dudley, his nine first-innings overs cost 51. He bowled just two overs in the second innings as Warwickshire completed an easy ten-wicket win. Lobban played one more Second XI game, against Glamorgan II at Cardiff Arms Park; in this he picked up five wickets.\nHe was also a professional boxer and played rugby union for Kidderminster.He later moved to Canada, where he worked as a teacher in Burnaby, British Columbia. He and his wife Celia had a son and two daughters.\nPassage 8:\nGreg A. Hill (artist)\nGreg A. Hill is a Canadian-born First Nations artist and curator. He is \nKanyen'kehà:ka Mohawk, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Ontario.\n\nEarly life\nHill was born and raised in Fort Erie, Ontario.\n\nArt career\nHis work as a multidisciplinary artist focuses primarily on installation, performance and digital imaging and explores issues of his Mohawk and French-Canadian identity through the prism of colonialism, nationalism and concepts of place and community.Hill has been exhibiting his work since 1989, with solo exhibitions and performance works across Canada as well as group exhibitions in North America and abroad. His work can be found in the collections of the Canada Council, the Indian Art Centre, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, the Canadian Native Arts Foundation (now Indspire), the Woodland Cultural Center, the City of Ottawa, the Ottawa Art Gallery and the International Museum of Electrography.\n\nCuratorial career\nHill serves as the Audain Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.\n\nAwards and honours\nIn 2018, Hill received the Indspire Award for Arts.\nPassage 9:\nTom Dickinson\nThomas or Tom Dickinson may refer to: \n\nThomas Dickenson, or Dickinson, merchant and politician of York, England\nThomas R. Dickinson, United States Army general\nJ. Thomas Dickinson, American physicist and astronomer\nTom Dickinson (cricketer), Australian-born cricketer in England\nTom Dickinson (American football), American football player\nPassage 10:\nWesley Barresi\nWesley Barresi (born 3 May 1984) is a South African born first-class and Netherlands international cricketer. He is a right-handed wicket keeper-batsman and also bowls right-arm offbreak. In February 2021, Barresi announced his retirement from all forms of cricket, but returned to the national team in August 2022.\n\nCareer\nWesley became the 100th victim to Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh, when he was dismissed in the 2011 World Cup game against India.In July 2018, he was named in the Netherlands' One Day International (ODI) squad, for their series against Nepal. Ahead of the ODI matches, the International Cricket Council (ICC) named him as the key player for the Netherlands.In July 2019, he was selected to play for the Amsterdam Knights in the inaugural edition of the Euro T20 Slam cricket tournament. However, the following month, the tournament was cancelled.",6 "char_len": 22350,7 "document_hash": "3cae17686bb2839698942eeac82b6cafeca68c30e864fd18f3c7bea39cc22b63",8 "questions": [9 {10 "question_id": "q00",11 "qtype": "2wikimqa",12 "question": "Who was born first, Vytautas Straižys or Mirjam Polkunen?"13 }14 ]15}