The Original Map is a Lie

           During class today, my entire view on the world was completely changed and I was extremely confused. Mr. Schick explained for nearly the entire class today how the map that I’ve seen all my life (Mercator projection map) is a complete lie because everything is disproportionate, and some countries aren’t in the right spot. For example, on this map, Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is really one-fourteenth the size of Africa. Antarctica seems to be huge when, it really isn’t that big at all. There are so many countries that were completely thrown off on the Mercator projection map that it’s hard to believe students trying to get a valuable education have relied on this for hundreds of years. Now, in more recent times, the Peter projection map is updated to show the countries in their proper size, shape, and location. Greenland, Alaska, Africa, Antarctica and many other countries are all the correct size and now people can actually take value from the maps that we see every day. It is still very shocking to me that my 9 years of learning about maps have nearly been useless because the map was wrong!