What do maps show us?
World in Your Hands
What do maps show us?
You unfold a map and see squiggly blue lines, green splotches, tiny dots labeled with names you can't pronounce. It's a bunch of colors and symbols crammed onto paper. But here's the secret: a map is a drawing of the world from the sky, shrunk down so small you can hold it in your hands.
Imagine you could float straight up, higher and higher, until cities look like ant colonies and rivers look like blue ribbons. That's what mapmakers pretend they're doing — looking down from an imaginary bird's-eye view. They draw what they see, turning the real three-dimensional world into a flat picture.
