Bored with your day-to-day life? Looking for a getaway? Why not browse through an atlas (a collection of maps).
Maps can take you on flights of fancy all over the world—and even out of it. Of course, most people use maps to help them get from one place to another. But maps can spark your imagination, suggesting where you could go, might go, and maybe will go! Maps also give us a look into the past by showing us what people understood about the world at various points in history.
A map is a picture that shows how different places relate to each other. A single map can’t tell us everything, so each map shows a selected reality. A map may be scribbled on a piece of scrap paper. Or it may be carefully painted on parchment as a work of art.
Mapmaking, or cartography, is both a science and an art, because people expect maps to be both nice to look at and also accurate. Let’s take a look at some maps and travel to a few new places!
