Peel an orange and try to set it down flat. What does it look like? You have to cut the peel and leave out spaces, or mush it together. It doesn’t work so well!
When you try to make a flat picture of a sphere, something ends up distorted – not quite true to life. Maps try to show size, distance, shape, and direction correctly. But when mapmakers project, or place, the world onto a flat map, at least one of those four things is distorted.
Here are three common projections, or ways to project Earth onto a flat map. As you’ll see, not all maps are created equal!
