Apparently, Batman is not only a superhero, but it is also a town in Turkey
While we are waiting for FOUND! Again, I thought that it would be useful to share some of the questions from the previous season. It can serve as a good preparation for the upcoming battles, expanding your toolkit, or even having fun – trying to solve them on your own. Just use the photos and questions and go on your own journey before reading how to solve it!
Disclaimer: there are usually at least several paths to find correct information using given clues. In these articles, I try to give the shortest and most direct way to find the information. But that doesn’t mean that your way is in any way worse. That’s the beauty of sourcing and finding the information online. Doesn’t matter what is your previous experience you can always find a way!
QUESTION 1: This place is preparing for a special event. Can you tell me which year was the first photo taken of the main person in this event?
One of the easier questions, but it has several layers. It sometimes can be confusing – how I am supposed to get the date from the building photo? I always advise breaking everything down into smaller steps. The picture is a snapshot from a live broadcast, that was happening last year. If we inspect the photo, we can see that it was not altered in any significant way. Google image search should be able to help us. If we use it, we get these results:
Now, when we have the correct place, we can do some further digging. When we go to the Abbey website, straight away we get our next clue:
This means, that Prince Charles (at that point in time) was having his coronation in the Westminster Abbey. That leaves us with pretty simple last steps. Get the date when the first picture was taken:
Sometimes it takes a bit of scrolling, to choose the right source of information. In this case, I have put “first photo” in quotes just to minimize all other noise. Prince is a famous figure, which can bring us lots of unrelated results. We are only interested in precise event – when was the first ever photo of Prince Charles taken? Together with the answer even comes the snapshot of the paper it was published. The answer is 1948.
QUESTION 2How is this place called (English version)?
Another photo question, but with a little bit of a twist. We can clearly see, that it is distorted, colors are washed away and most likely google image search will not bring us any palpable results. The next step would be to look for some visual clues, to begin the search. There is a building, but unless you know exactly what it is not helpful. In the top left corner, we can see what supposedly is a street or a square name. Lets see where it gets us:
Google Maps directs us to Gdansk. A quick check on the images section doesn’t give us that much. We can’t see anything close to what is in the clue. Alternatively, you can use Google Maps, choose the street view, and go for a walk in the city. But from my experience when tend to look for monuments image search does the job quite well.
When we first searched for the “Piwna” street, we saw that there is another street with the same name, but in Warsaw. Let's see what it looks like:
The top left corner we get to see something similar to what is visualized in the clue. Quick tour in the Warsaw streets, to double check if we are on to something:
And here we are! When translated into English it gives us our answer – Royal Castle.
QUESTION 3: Search engines usually do one function - provide search results. But can you pour tea with them? Your answer should be three digits.
Well, this one is a bit tricky. The question itself doesn’t provide much to get on with, but we can see at least three parts to it – search engine, pour tea, three digits. It’s always important to break down questions like these and try bit by bit to decode everything.
First of – search engines. Let us go with the most popular one for now, Google.
With a simple search – Google tea or Google pour tea – there is nothing to go on with. Few doodles to celebrate tea, or to be more precise bubble tea, and some people ask google assistant how to make tea. Once again, we have a similar problem to Prince Charles. Too many generic results that lead nowhere. So, this time let's be more specific with the question and use quotes:
First result we get on the search already looks really promising, after checking the article, we get our answer:
It’s one of the many Google easter eggs. When you type something specific into the search bar, you can be pleasantly surprised. In this case, it is server error code – 418 – which is also our answer. It began many years ago as an April Fools joke, and later on was proposed to implement. That’s how you can pour tea with the help of a search engine!
QUESTION 4: Tell me the name of the Swedish politician, whose origins have to do something with this 26.357896, 127.783809
Straight away we have a couple of clues to go with. The easiest to check is the numbers, which look like coordinates. Let’s plug them into Google and see what we get.
From the results on the map, we can see that this is a place in Japa, which looks really strange and not really informative. But before diving into the maps to look for more information I always like to do a brief overview. The first result from Pinterest sends us to the same locations but mentions the Batman sign. Well, that’s definitely odd, wouldn’t you say? Let's leave this tab open, and check the second part. Swedish politician. Maybe we can get a list of them?
We can, but the lists seem to be not that exhaustive and include lots of manual labor, going through them. When you are in a competition and time is limited, you always need to think of actions that are not that time-consuming. At this point, we have Batman and Swedish politicians. How about querying Google with it?
Not really clever Boolean, but it gets the job done. We can see two more clues, which begin to give the full picture. If we click on the Wikipedia page, we can see the following information:
Apparently, Batman is not only a superhero, but it is also a town in Turkey. And Nalin is the person we needed to find. She’s currently an active member of the Sweden parliament. We just made one of the most unlikely matches you could think of. But we got our answer.
QUESTION 5: This person helped to establish one sports federation in 1932 and has a cup named after him. Can you tell me the only Lithuanian team name who won it?
After reading all of the descriptions, are you ready to tackle one for yourself? :) Try it for yourself, and only then read how to solve it!
First of all, we have a year and a hint that has something to do with the federation. Let's pull up a list of sports federations, that were established in 1932 as we what we get.
Using Wikipedia and X social network, we can quickly determine, that it was FIBA – International Federation of Basketball. Now we need to find who actually founded FIBA.
After some digging through search results, we can find even a diagram about basketball. And in 1932 FIBA’s president was Léon Bouffard, Secretary William Jones. Only Jones has a tournament named after him. Wikipedia comes to help one more time, and we have our answer.
The team is Žalgiris, the only Lithuanian team, that won this tournament.
Hope you had fun and maybe learned a thing or two after reading these questions and how to approach them. Until the beginning of FOUND! Again you will see a series of these articles, to test skills, prepare for the tournament, and have some fun.
Happy hunting! :)