Zoomed-in picture round: 8 everyday things under the microscope

Zoom in far enough and the most boring object in the room turns alien. A zoomed-in round plays on that: teams know they've handled every one of these things, probably today, but at this magnification the familiar texture is gone and they're left arguing about whether it's food or furniture. It's the picture round that gets the most "oh, of course" groans at the reveal.

Here are eight to run. Tap a picture to check it, or open the round in the quiz builder with the button under the grid.

How to run it

Tell teams the rule before you start: every answer is something you'd find in an ordinary house, and you want the object, not the material. "Metal" is not an answer; "a paperclip" is. That one sentence stops the round collapsing into "it's plastic" eight times over.

Five minutes is about right. Unlike flags or faces, zoomed-in pictures reward staring, and the fun is in the table slowly talking itself from "coral?" to "hang on, is that a pen?". Don't rush it.

Score one point each, and write down your accepted alternatives in advance. For this set, accept any writing implement for the fourth and fifth pictures if a team gets the right type of pen or pencil but not the exact one, and accept "blood" for the last.

Facts for the reveal

Reveal all eight first, then go back through, because every one of these has a fact that lands better once people can see what they missed.

The first was invented by a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral, after a walk in the Alps in 1941 left his dog covered in burrs. He looked at them under a microscope, saw the tiny hooks, and spent the next decade working out how to make them in nylon. Wikipedia has the full story.

The second is a single continuous groove, not thousands of them. A twelve-inch LP's spiral runs to something like 500 metres if you unwound it, and the stylus reads the music from wiggles in the groove walls a few micrometres across.

The third gets its colour from a coating of molasses on each crystal. White sugar is the same crystal with the molasses washed off, which is why the two behave differently when you bake with them.

The fourth is not lead and never was. Pencil "lead" is graphite mixed with clay, and the hardness grades (HB, 2B and so on) come from the ratio between the two.

The fifth has a ball of tungsten carbide, usually under a millimetre across, that rolls ink out of the reservoir as you write. Under magnification it looks like a planet.

The sixth is about 70 micrometres across on average, which is roughly the width of this round's eighth picture ten times over. Everyone at the table has thousands of them per square centimetre of scalp, and the scales you can see in the close-up are what make hair tangle.

The seventh is the one teams get most wrong, usually guessing some kind of reptile skin. It's the bumpy skin of a gherkin, which only looks smooth from a distance.

The eighth are red blood cells. They have no nucleus, which is why they look like doughnuts with the hole not quite punched through, and that shape gives them the surface area to carry oxygen efficiently.

Variations

• Reveal in stages. Show each picture at three zoom levels, closest first, and award three points for a correct answer at the first level, two at the second, one at the last. It turns a quiet round into an auction.
• Theme it. Everything from the kitchen, or everything from a stationery drawer, narrows the field enough to make the hardest pictures gettable.
• Go local. A close-up of the pub's own carpet or bar top is a guaranteed laugh, and the regulars will still get it wrong.

For more formats like this one, see our picture round ideas. If you want a second picture round for the same night, the famous redheads round is a good contrast: faces after textures.