Maps, maps more maps!

Maps are used to locate a certain place in a particular location. Apart from that, maps are also used for creating a plan to organise a particular city. It creates structure. They are used by a few categories of people. They include: scientists, tourists, sailors, pilots and urban city planners. There are different types of maps which usually fall into two main categories: digital and physical maps. Can you think of an example of a digital map? One of the popular ones will be Google Earth. It is electronic which gives a three dimensional view of the whole Earth and enables us to zoom and focus into a certain state or city or even road. This will be what is called a satellite view. Next up, comes the physical maps. They include: Tourist maps, Information maps and lastly, Topographical maps. They give a bird's eye view of the certain place and is unable to zoom in or identify another location. In total, there are three types of perspectives: Satellite view, Aerial view and Landscape view(from your eye level).Miss J emphasised on topographical maps during our lessons. She went through the elements of this types of maps. A topographical map has grid patterns and grid references, which are numbers at the sides of the map. There is also a colour bar at the top of the map to check if a person is colour blind as the legends that are located at the bottom of the map require a person to identify certain colours to locate his or hers destination. There is a degree at the top of the map to identify the place showed by the map. There are lines on the map called Northings and Eastings. What do you think are they? They Northings are the lines that run vertically down on the map while the Eastings are the horizontal lines that run on the map. We also need scales to measure the actual distance in the real world using the scale on the map. Example, 1 cm in the map could mean 50000 cm in the real world.