Practice question · Multiple choice
Roughly how much larger is Africa than Greenland, despite Mercator showing them at similar size?
Hints
- Mercator inflates area with latitude, and Greenland is very far north.
- The error is not subtle.
Show the answer
C. About 14 times larger
Why
Fourteen times. Mercator preserves angles, which makes it superb for navigation and grotesque for area, and it spent four centuries as the default wall map of a hemisphere that happened to sit at high latitudes.
Practise Visual and Iconographic Sources
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