How to call a getter from a subclass which hasn't an abstract declaration in the superclass

I have a superclass that I instantiate as ArrayList. A subclass of the superclass is saved in the ArrayList. Now I want to get the information out of the ArrayList, but the getter for the attribute is only available in the subclass. I can get the information (which are saved in the ArrayList too) from other classes that have an abstract declaration in the abstract superclass. However, I don’t like to implement “dummy” methods in all classes which extend the superclass.

Code truncated:

public class Question{

        QuestionPool() {
         questionPool = new ArrayList<Question>();
         ClozeQuestions q15 = new ClozeQuestions("Erster Text", "Zweiter Text");
         questionPool.add(q15);
        }
         public int startQuiz{
         System.out.printf("Q: %s", questionPool.get(i).?????
        }
}

public abstract class Question {

    String question;
    public String getQuestion() {
    return question;
    }
}

public class ClozeQuestions extends Question {

    ClozeQuestions(String questionPart1, String questionPart2){
        this.questionPart1 = questionPart1;
        this.questionPart2 = questionPart2;
    }

    public String getQuestionPart1() {
        return questionPart1;
    }

    public String getQuestionPart2() {
        return questionPart2;
    }  
}        

To circumvent the problem I implemented a "helper method" in the Question class:

        ClozeQuestions question2ClozeQuestion = new ClozeQuestions();
        return question2ClozeQuestion.getQuestionPart1();
    }

Which I call from the QuestionPool class:

System.out.printf("Q: %s", questionPool.get(i).getQuestionPart1());

Since the objects in the list are stored as the type of the superclass, you will have to cast it to the subclass before you can access the subclass methods. This is what type casting looks like:

(Subclass)objectOfSuperclassType

And to be safe, you should type check before casting which can be done with 'instanceof':

if (objectOfSuperclassType instanceof Subclass) {
    Subclass objectOfSubclassType = (Subclass)objectOfSuperClass
}

And finally, an example of how to implement this when dealing with a list:

List<Superclass> myList = new ArrayList<>();
myList.add(new Subclass());

if (myList.get(0) instanceof Subclass) {
        System.out.println( ((Subclass) myList.get(0)).getSomeString() );
}

Although this may answer your question, the code you provided does not require the List to be initialized with the superclass at all. If you were to have two different subclasses and stored both of them in the same list, only then would it make sense to do this.