Amazing Facts of Maps..... ( ENGLISH )

                       The World in Maps

Think of how hard it is to peel an orange and press the resulting pieces of peel down flat on atable. that analogy represents the challenge faced by the mapmaker, who attempts to turn the spherical planet Earth into a flat visual representation. To tackle the challenge-getting the surface of a sphere to lie flat-cartographers use shapes that lend themselves to flattening, such as planes, cones, and cylinders, known as developable surfaces.

By applying mathematical calculations to the developable surfaces, they can transform Earth's features into flat forms. those forms are called projections, and they represent the challenge of mapmaking through the centurirs.

Projections inevitably result in distortions. those distortions. those distortions can be controlled to some degree by the choice of map shape, which depends on which part of the planet is of most interest to the cartographer.

Only where the surface directly touches the globe will the map be completely accurate. Away from these points of contact, Earth's features become stretched or squeezed in order to become flat.

• Changing Fashions in World Maps

No one world map projecton can do it all - accurate distance, direction shape, and area. Over the years, different projections have come to the forefront.

The Winkel tripel projection, adopted in 1998 by the national Geographic society, is most often chosen today for general reference.

The Robinson projection was favored for classrooms and textbooks from 1988 to 1998.

The van der Grinten projection was used by the national Geographic society for most of its political maps from 1922 into the 1980s.

The mercator projection,centuries old and yet still broadly used, also distorts the relative sizes of  landmasses in high latitudes.

• Standard Map Projections

CONICAL PROJECTIONS are made as if a large paper cone rested on the top on the globe, with its point above the north pole and its bottom edge touching the globe somewhere north of the Equator, when the cone is cut,a flat map unfolds, shaped like a fan. conical projections are best for showing areas in the middle latitudes.

CYLINDRICAL PROJECTIONS show the globe asif it were projected onto a large sheet of paper surrounding it, those points around the center, near the Equator, appear accurately, but areas near the poles are stretched, causing landmarks far to the north and south to look much larger than they really are.

AZIMUTHAL PROJECTIONS are also called plane or zenithal projections. To create these, the mapmaker designates one point of the globe as the center of the map- the point can be anywhere- and projects an image as if a flat piece of stiff paper were resting there.