I remember being told this in high school and being totally confused. My teacher told us that a standard map, or even a globe, is inaccurate. She explained why but I didn’t understand. Why is this?
In: Technology
Mapping a mostly-spherical object to a flat map is a difficult thing to do if you want to preserve all of the data. The maps we are used to generally do a bad job of representing the true size of countries; it warps the dimensions based on how close/far you are from the equator, changing how we view the size/shape/tilt of each country. Things like Greenland appear very large, when in reality they’re not any bigger than Brazil. Antarctica seems like a HUGE, interminable landmass, but it’s actually half the size Africa. You can easily check this by comparing the listed sizes on Wikipedia
Check out thetruesize.com to get a better idea. It lets you drag countries around the map and adjusts the size accordingly.
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