Maps and scale Lesson 1 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A map is the world shrunk by the same amount everywhere, so a ruler on paper can still measure real distances. 1 The scale tells you how much it was shrunk: 1:50,000 means 1 cm on the paper is 50,000 cm, or 500 metres, on the ground. 2 Think of the EU5 map: zoomed right out you see the whole world with little detail, like a small-scale map; zoomed in on one province you see every river bend, like a large-scale map. 3 But the game prints no scale at all, so you judge distance by how many locations an army marches through, not by kilometres, and a real map is far more exact. 4 A key explains the symbols, contour lines show how high and steep the land is, and grid references let two people point to exactly the same square. 5 Only a globe gets shapes, sizes, distances and directions all right at once; every flat map, the game's included, bends something. 6 A map scale of 1:50,000 means that 1 cm on the map stands for 50,000 cm, which is 500 metres, on the real ground. 7 A large-scale map, such as 1:25,000, shows a small area in great detail, while a small-scale map, such as 1:10,000,000, shows a huge area with little detail. 8 Great Britain's national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, began in 1791 and makes detailed maps at scales of 1:25,000 and 1:50,000. 9 Contour lines join points of equal height above sea level, and lines drawn close together mean the ground is steep. 10 On British maps a four-figure grid reference gives the eastings (the number along the bottom) first and the northings (the number up the side) second. 11 Maps use a key, also called a legend, that explains the symbols, colours and lines, such as blue for water and a cross for a church. 12 A political map shows countries, borders and cities, while a physical map shows natural features such as mountains, rivers and heights. 13 Only a globe can show the shapes, areas, distances and directions of all places correctly at the same time. 14 The Earth is about 40,000 km around the equator, and the Greek scholar Eratosthenes estimated this size quite well around 240 BC. 15 From the late 1200s, sailors in the Mediterranean used portolan charts, sea maps with coastlines and criss-crossing compass lines. 16 A satnav or phone finds its position by timing radio signals from at least four satellites in orbit. 17 EU5 shows hills and mountains as terrain pictures, a rough version of what contour lines show exactly, and its map modes are like maps with different keys laid over the same land. next → Directions, latitude and longitude↑ back to Geography This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/1-maps-and-scale/