Correcting the Mercator Map

You know how the Mercator Map makes Greenland look huge? Since we used the handy flat world map so often in school, we are just used to it. Now a site called The True Size can help dispel those notions of geography that are so ingrained. Type in a nation and drag it around to see how large it really is in comparison to other countries on the map. Greenland is actually tiny when set next to, say, Brazil. We know that Russia is the world’s largest nation in area, with Canada in second place, but when you drag them closer to the equator, you see that the difference is not as vast as you may have thought.

Meanwhile, those "small" nations in equatorial Africa aren't really small. The Democratic Republic of Congo grows to cover half of Europe when you move it north. The real fun is to move Antarctica around. Sure, it’s big (if it were a nation, it would be second only to Russia), but it’s not as ridiculously dominant as the Mercator map would have us believe. -via mental_floss


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Of course, that's a better idea. Every classroom and family should have a world globe. But it's hard to get a classroom of 30 kids around a globe at once. The big flat map can stay on the wall, out of the way, for years, which distorts the image in your mind as you see it year after year in school.
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