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Why might a cartographer use a map with a known distortion? Explain your answer and

nclude examples. ITS URGENTTTTT

User Keisha
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1 Answer

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14 votes

Step-by-step explanation:

In cartography, a distortion is the misrepresentation of the area or

shape of a feature. There are no map projections that can maintain a

perfect scale throughout the entire projection because they are taking

a sphereoid and forcing it onto a flat surface. There are four main

types of distortion that come from map projections: distance,

direction, shape and area. The Mercator projection, for example,

distorts Greenland because of its high latitude , in the sense that its

shape and size are not the same as those on a globe . Another example

is in cylindrical projections. With projections the distortion is minimal

at the lines of tangency, or the line along which the projection and the

surface of the earth intersect. The further from those lines you get, the

more distortion appears in the projection. Different projections are

better at minimizing different typed of distortion. For example,

conformal conic projections mostly preserve shape, equidistant

projections preserve distance and equal area projections preserve area

User Dan Moldovan
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