Map Bias Assessment Essay

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Map Bias Assessment Maps are a way to portray the world in a visual way. Cartographers, people who create maps, create maps to aid people in seeing various traits of the world. It could be physical traits (terrains, land mass, elevation and more) or abstract traits such as political boundaries, average lifespan, population or how developed a country is in terms of economy (GDP). Maps are the perfect way to represent a diverse continent such as Asia. There are many advantages and disadvantages in maps. The two maps I have chosen below both have many pros and cons but have advantages that make it special. Map A (Bottom Left) is a Life expectancy map of Asia. Life expectancy maps show the average age people are able to live up to in that particular country. Maps like this are created to show people the living conditions in the country. This information might be helpful to …show more content…

That is why projections were created. To illustrate the world in the most unbiased way possible, cartographers created projections in order to aid people’s comprehension of the world. The mercator projection is probably the most common projection but is extremely biased. The mercator projections is biased towards the northern hemisphere because it was generally used for navigation. The Peter’s projection was created as a result of the Mercator being so inaccurate. The Peter’s projection has very precise land mass proportion in comparison to the Mercator projection. Even though the Peter’s projection may be pretty accurate, since the world is a sphere there can never be non-distorted unbiased map. Another reason why maps are biased is because of the data it is focusing on. Maps can never show every aspect of the world such as education, political, religion, physical, GDP etc… in one map. Because of this maps will always have a topic that it is biased towards which causes it to be

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