Mr. Maps Miraculous Map Moment

Hello kids! My name is Mr. Cartographer but you guys can call me Mr. Map, ok? Great! Let’s get started shall we?

First let’s go over the basics. The lines of longitude and latitude, what are they? Longitude and latitude are lines people like me draw on maps so it is easier to find places. The longitude lines go from north to south and the latitude lines go from east to west. They make a grid over the whole map. When you want to find something on a map you can look at the lines of longitude and latitude and locate the place you are looking for. Each line of longitude and latitude has a number which is called a degree. Let’s say you are looking up longitude 53 degrees and latitude 74degrees. All you have to do is go to the longitude 53 line and the latitude 74 line and follow them till they intersect. And then you have it! You have found a spot on the map by using longitude and latitude.

Now that you know all about longitude and latitude you will be able to quickly understand the idea of hemispheres. Hemispheres mean half spheres. Imagine that you take a ball and cut it in half. Then you have two parts to the ball. Well, if you take the earth and put an imaginary line running from top to bottom you get two sides which are called the west and east hemispheres. This line is called the central meridian. If you put an imaginary line around the middle of the earth, as if it was wearing a belt you get the north and south hemispheres. This middle line is called the equator.

On every map you find a compass. The compass shows you which way is north, south, east and west. You need this compass because it helps you understand how to look at the map. Then you can tell your friend, “Hey look, Vancouver is north of Seattle.” And your friend can say, “No way, Seattle is south of Vancouver” and you can laugh at your funny geography humor. Geography is just so much fun!

If you really want to have fun then you need to know about time zones. There are twenty four time zones just like there are 24 hours in a day. If you travel east you are traveling into the future and you have to turn your clock ahead. If you are traveling west you are going back in time and you need to turn your clock back. Have you ever gone on a plane and traveled west and ended up in your final destination even before you left on your trip? Ha! That’s when time zones are really fun. Try it sometime!

When you talk about scales and maps you are not trying to talk about how much the map weighs. You are really talking about how many centimeters equal how many meters. Let’s say you took a life size photo of yourself and you shrunk it 1000 times so that your picture would fit on a map with everything else that was shrunk 1000 times too. If you looked at that map you would see something that looked like 1:1000 and that would explain how many times you were shrunk. That is how scale works. It shrinks everything and then tells you the ratio.

A map legend is not a story all about how the map comes to exist. It is actually a fun code at the bottom of a map. You can be a detective like Nancy Drew or Sherlock Holmes and figure out what every little dot and squiggle means on a map. Let’s say that you are home alone on a Saturday night and you have nothing to do, what can you think of that could be better than grabbing your old maps and figuring out all the legends.

Bayle