What is the problem with all flat maps?

Answer 1

When you take a 3-d map to a 2-d map, it becomes distorted. You simply cannot take a picture in a rounded form and put it on a flat surface-it's going to look a bit weird. Anyway, distortion on a map is when the countries, oceans, land features, etc aren't their exact shape- this is why all flat maps are technically not accurate.

Hope this helps you!

-J
You can't make an entirely accurate copy of a curved surface - as the Earth - onto a flat paper. Just try covering a ball with a paper w/o any wrinkles and see.

There will always be some errors. And the bigger Earth area you try to fit into the same map, the bigger the errors become.
No matter what kind of map is made , some portion of the surface will always look either too small,too big out out of place.Mapmakers have. however,found many ways to limit the distortion of shape, size,distance, and direction.
Basically, the world is a sphere, and a map is a flat surface. It's hard to translate between the two, since a sphere is a curved object, and a map is completely flat.

Say for example that you have a globe, and you wanted to wrap it in a sheet of paper. The globe is the Earth, and the sheet of paper is a map of its surface. If you tried it, you would find that it is extremely hard to do this. Try wrapping the paper so that it forms a cylinder, touching the equator. You will see that, as you approach the poles, the paper is farther away from the surface. Obviously, a rectangular map would do a pretty poor job of mapping the surface of a sphere.

There are a dozen different kinds of maps for the Earth, each one using a different pattern or technique. None of them are the "true" map of the Earth- really, if there was one representation that was the ultimate ideal, it would be the globe- but some come very close.

This doesn't just apply to maps of the entire world. There will always be at least a little distortion in 2D maps. However, smaller maps will always be more accurate than larger ones- so a map of your city would be far more accurate than a map of your country, or continent. This is because the smaller the area, or "patch" of the globe, the flatter it is. So a representation of a one-inch-by-one-inch part of a globe would be more accurate than a map of half the globe.

Answer 2

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