Maps and Directions
Reading a map
Find the four things nearly every map carries — its title, its direction arrow, its key and its scale — and use the key to say what a symbol or a color on the map stands for.
A map is a drawing of a place as it would look from above, flattened onto paper. Seen from up there nothing hides behind anything else: the road really does run past the back of the school, and the river really does bend around the fields. That is the whole trick of a map, and it is why one sheet of paper can be more useful than standing in the middle of the place it shows.
A map's four helpers
Nearly every map carries four things. The title says which place it shows and what about it. The direction arrow says which way north lies — usually straight up the page. The key says what each mark and each color on the map stands for. And the scale says how much real ground a length on the paper stands for. A map missing one of the four is a map you have to guess at.
There is no room on a sheet of paper to draw a school, a well and a bridge as they really look, so a map uses small marks instead — a symbol for each kind of thing. Colors do the same work: many maps use blue for water, green for low flat land and brown for high land. None of this is something you are expected to know beforehand. The key on that particular map tells you, and a mark or color used by a map with no key means nothing at all.
Maps come in kinds, and which kind you want depends on what you are asking. A physical map shows the natural land — mountains, plains, plateaus, rivers and seas. A political map shows what people have drawn on top of it — borders, regions, administrative centers. And a drawing of a very small area, such as a single room with its furniture, is not called a map at all: it is a plan, drawn far larger than any map would draw the same space.
Worked example
A map's key shows a small blue patch for water and a small brown triangle for a peak. Somewhere near the top of the map is a brown triangle with a blue patch just beside it. What is there, really?
Look up each mark in the key, one at a time. The triangle is a peak; the patch is water.
The key is the only place either mark means anything. Reading a map is looking things up, not remembering them.
Try it together
You are handed a map headed 'The fields around our village'. It has an arrow pointing to the top of the page marked N, a box down the right-hand side, and a marked line at the bottom.
Name the helper each part of the map is, in one or two words.
1.The heading across the top tells you which place the map shows. Which of the four helpers is that?
Have a go
Have a go on your own. Which of a map's four helpers tells you which way north lies on the page?
Ready to practice?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.