by Rachel Matthews
Once, in grade school, I was given
a blank map of the world and asked to label every country (in pen—yikes). I may
have gotten a lot wrong on that test, but it turns out the map I was working
with may not have been accurate to begin with!
I was probably being tested on the Mercator
projection, one of today’s most common maps. It was created in 1569 with
colonial trade routes in mind. As a result, North America and Europe ended up
disproportionally emphasized.
Since Earth is round, any
two-dimensional map will be distorted. But the Boston Public School (BPS)
system is trading out its Mercator maps for a more geographically accurate
model: the Gall-Peters
projection, which first started gaining traction around 1974.
When I first saw it, I was
suspicious; the continents seemed oddly stretched. But the Gall-Peters
projection accurately scales surface area, so you can see how big (or small)
places actually are.
For example, on the Mercator map,
Greenland rivals Africa in size. In reality, Africa could swallow Greenland nearly
14 times!
Hopefully the Gall-Peters
projection will give BPS students a more well-rounded view of the world (pun
intended).
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