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
If you map a curved surface to a flat surface, you can’t do this accurately – in effect, you’re scrunching things up. You have a chance to what kind of inaccuracies you get.
In a standard Mercator projection, you keep local angles and shapes accurate. This is useful when you want a map to tell you where to go.
On the other hand, it distorts distances. Things near the poles look much larger than they are – compare Greenland on a standard (Mercator projection) map and on a globe.
In another context, you may prefer a map that keeps relative sizes or distances, but distorts shapes. There are quite a few different projections available, but none of them are perfect.
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