Question

What are the features of political maps?

Answer 1

What Is a Political Map?
There are many types of maps: political, physical, topographical, and even your plain old road map. So what makes all of these different from one another? In this video, we will focus on the different features of the political map. In short, a political map is one that shows the political features of a given area. These features can include things like: countries, states, provinces, cities, towns, major highways and byways, and major water structures. Like you might guess, there are lots of different sizes of political maps. Some cover entire continents, some are regional, and still others are of much smaller areas, such as a state or a county. Chances are, you have seen lots of political maps in your lifetime. The key to using these kind of maps is knowing how to read one.

Reading Political Maps
The first thing you need to know about reading a political map is how to orient yourself to what is on the page. Whether you are looking at the map in your hand, in a book, or on the computer, some things about maps will be the same no matter what. One of these is direction. North will always be at the top of the map, south at the bottom, east to your right, and west to your left. Every political map is like this.

Now that you are oriented, what do you see? On a political map, one of the main features is geographical boundaries. For example, let's take a map of Europe. The first thing you might notice is lots of boundaries between countries. The squiggly lines you see represent those boundaries. You might also see some major cities on the map, including each country's capital city,