🗺️ Reading a Map

Hello! Today we will learn how to read a map. We are going to an imaginary island called Coral Island. And there is hidden treasure!

A sketch plan and a map both look down from above. A sketch plan is a simple drawing of a small place, like a classroom, with no scale. A map shows a big place, like an island, drawn using a scale. Distances on a map match real life.

Here is our imaginary island: Coral Island. It is a map, drawn from above, like a bird’s eye view. The island has mountains, a lake, a river, a forest, a road, a city and a harbour. But to understand the drawing, we need some clues.

We cannot write everything on a map, so we use symbols. The key, also called the legend, tells us what the symbols mean. A brown triangle is a mountain, a blue line is a river, a red dot is a city. The key is the map’s dictionary.

A real road can be 30 kilometres long. It would never fit on paper! Mapmakers make every distance smaller by the same amount. This is called the scale. 1 cm = 10 km means 1 centimetre on the map stands for 10 kilometres in real life.

Let’s use the scale to find a distance. We measure from the harbour to the city with a ruler: 3 cm. The scale is 1 cm = 10 km, so 3 times 10 equals 30 km. A ruler, a scale and multiplying: that is all it takes!

On a physical map, colours show how high the land is. Blue is water. Green is low land. Yellow is a little higher. Brown is mountains. The darker the colour, the higher the land.

Directions matter on a map too. Usually north is at the top. On Coral Island the mountains are in the north, the harbour is in the south, the city is in the east and the lake is in the west. The arrow in the corner of a map points north.

Now for a treasure hunt! Start at the harbour. Follow the road to the city. From the city, walk north. You will find the treasure on the yellow hills. The key, directions, scale and colours: we used them all!

To sum up: a sketch plan is a drawing of a small place with no scale, and a map shows a big place with a scale. The key explains the symbols and the scale helps us find distances. Colours show height and the arrow shows direction. Now try it in Together World!