A nice summary from National Geographic (who better) on the misconceptions of the world’s geography because of distorted maps and our need for simple mental images.
For example, in reality:
- Most of South America is east of Florida.
- Most of Africa is north of the Equator.
- Most of Europe is east of Canada, not the US.
Mercator maps are particularly egregious when it comes to imagining the relative size of places.
South America is eight times larger than Greenland- Brazil is larger than the contiguous US, and almost as big as Canada.
- Alaska is smaller than Libya.
A few other interesting ones from a Canadian point of view:
* Toronto is at roughly the same latitude as Monaco.
* Edmonton is about level with Hamburg, and south of Edinburgh.
* Iqaluit is just south of Umeå in Sweden (which has a university with thirty thousand students, and a system of electric commuter trains).
And, of course, everybody knows that the Canada-U.S. border follows the 49th parallel, despite a large portion of the Canadian population living well to the south of that line.