Maps can be misleading without ______
Answers
Explanation:
Work in the Foreign Service, dealing with U.S. interests, objectives and activities all over the world, derives some utility from knowing what our three-dimensional Earth really looks like. It cannot be reproduced with anything remotely resembling accuracy on a twodimensional piece of paper, but awareness of the problems resulting from the effort to try can be useful.
My interest in maps, which has become a bit of a fixation, began in the fifth grade, when I asked a teacher how Australia, which the map showed as a rather small South Pacific island, could be ranked as a continent. We went down the hall, and for the first time I saw a globe. It revealed that Australia is in fact an extremely large island, and merits the label. But I was puzzled: why the visual disparity? I have since learned.
Flattening Earth’s image requires that parts of it be extensively stretched, in width and height, resulting in four highly significant distortions: size, shape, direction and distance. The larger the area covered, and the farther it is from the equator, the greater the distortions (especially east-west). Consider this: the North Pole, which is a point, appears on a map of the world as an area that is 24,000 miles wide—that’s the length of the equator. This explains why Greenland looks huge: It really isn’t.
Americans, who have been raised with and rely on Gerardus Mercator’s 16th-century map, are not aware of how inaccurately it presents the world. For example, the distance from Tokyo to Singapore is actually 210 percent longer than from London to Moscow; yet is only 10 percent longer on the map, because Tokyo-Singapore is more vertical, more north-south, and closer to the equator. London-Moscow is horizontal, more eastwest, and farther from the equator.
There are additional issues, one of which is to accept memories of what we have seen as representing reality. The United States and Russia are only 55 miles apart in the Bering Sea, but are widely separated visually on most maps. Santiago, Chile, is actually farther east than Key West, Florida.
Flattening Earth’s image requires that parts of it be extensively stretched, in width and height, resulting in four highly significant distortions: size, shape, direction and distance. The larger the area covered, and the farther it is from the equator, the greater the distortions (especially east-west). Consider this: the North Pole, which is a point, appears on a map of the world as an area that is 24,000 miles wide—that’s the