Map Skills and Geographical Techniques

A map is a set of measurements

Map skills usually arrive as a bag of fiddly conventions: which way round the numbers go, what the little symbols mean, how many figures to give. Learned that way they are forgettable, and they feel arbitrary because nobody said what they are for. A map is not a picture of a place. It is a set of measurements you can read off. Every technique here answers a question you could otherwise only answer by going there and looking: how far is it, how steep is that hill, how high am I standing, what is in that valley, could you see one place from the other. And the conventions are not arbitrary. They exist so that the answer is the same for a stranger reading the map in another country as it is for the person who drew it. A rule that removes ambiguity is worth knowing; a rule to chant is not. So carry one question through everything here: what question is this technique answering, and how does the map know? The landscapes and processes themselves, and what to do with data you collected yourself in the field, are the other parts of this course.

Five words used exactly

The first two are the pair most often muddled, and muddling them costs marks in a way that is easy to avoid.

Two questions a map can settle exactly

Five questions somebody might ask about a place. Tap the TWO that a map can answer exactly, rather than approximately or not at all.

• How far is it in a straight line from the bridge to the church?
• Is the walk between them a pleasant one?
• How high above sea level is the summit?
• How busy is that road at eight in the morning?
• Which of the two villages is the nicer place to live?

Four figures or six

A question asks which grid square contains a patch of woodland that spreads across most of one square. Another asks for the location of a single trig point. Which reference does each need?

• Four figures for the woodland and six for the trig point, because four figures names a whole square and six figures names a point within one
• Six figures for both, since six figures is always more accurate
• Four figures for both, since it is simpler and still identifies the area
• Six figures for the woodland and four for the trig point

A square, and a point

Both are grid references and they do different jobs. Choosing the wrong one is not a rounding error; it is answering a different question from the one that was asked.

Five questions, five different techniques

Measuring a curved distance

You need the distance by road between two points on a map. Put the steps in order.

• Find both points and mark where the route starts and ends
• Lay a strip of paper along the first straight section and mark it
• Pivot the strip at each bend and keep marking, so the whole route is transferred
• Read the total length off the strip against a ruler, in centimetres
• Convert using the scale, to get the real distance
• Sanity-check the answer against the grid squares the route crosses

What the technique marks reward

Three habits, and all three are worth more than memorising the key. Give the answer in the units the question asked for. A distance measured in centimetres on the map is not an answer. Converting it, and writing the unit, is the part being marked, and it is the most commonly dropped mark on the whole node. Describe a slope from the spacing, not from the numbers. Saying the land rises from one height to another is reading two labels. Saying the contours are packed together on the western side and widely spaced to the east is describing the shape of the hill. ⭐ And always check an answer against the grid. Every square is a known size, so counting squares gives you a rough distance in seconds. If your careful measurement and your rough count disagree by a lot, one of them is wrong, and finding out which costs far less than losing the mark. Most scale errors are out by a factor of ten, which a glance at the grid catches immediately.

Read the relief

Each description is of contour lines on a map. Decide what the land is doing. Three lives.

Row H, seat twelve

Somebody is meeting a friend at a theatre and texts to say where they are sitting. There are two useful things they might send, and they are not versions of the same thing. The first is the circle, on the left-hand side. That is an area. It is exactly right if the friend is asking which part of the building to walk into, and it would be useless for finding the actual seat, because there are two hundred of them in it. The second is row H, seat twelve. That is a point. It is exactly right for finding the seat, and completely unhelpful to somebody standing outside trying to work out which staircase to take, because a seat number does not tell you which part of the building it is in. ⭐ Neither is more accurate than the other in any useful sense. They answer different questions, and sending the wrong one is not a small error of precision. It is an answer to a question nobody asked.

Turn a measurement into a distance

On a map with a scale of 1 to 50,000, one centimetre on the map is half a kilometre on the ground. Two points measure 9 centimetres apart in a straight line. How far apart are they in reality, in kilometres?

Finish the map-skills sentences

The number running along the bottom of a map, increasing to the right, is the _____, and it always comes first because you go along before you go up. The number running up the side is the _____. A reference using four figures names a whole _____, which is the right answer for anything spread out, while six figures names a point inside one. The fixed relationship between a distance measured on the paper and the same distance on the ground is the _____, and forgetting to apply it is the most commonly dropped mark on this part of the course. A line joining places of equal height is a _____, and how far apart those lines sit tells you how _____ the ground is, which the numbers printed on them do not.

Build a description of the land

A question asks you to describe the relief shown in one part of a map. Assemble the answer that would earn most.

Four questions in one exam

A student is working through the skills questions on a paper, using a map extract they have never seen. Each stage hands them a decision.

• A question asks for the grid reference of a lake that fills most of one square. They start working out six figures. Decide.
• They measure a straight-line distance as 7 centimetres and write 7 as the answer. Decide what is missing.
• A question asks them to describe the relief. They write that the land is between 150 and 400 metres high. Decide.
• Their calculated distance comes out at 32 kilometres for a walk between two villages that are three grid squares apart. Decide.

Explain what a map can tell you

Somebody says a map is just a picture of a place and they could learn more by looking at a photograph. Explain what a map can tell them that a photograph cannot, and how.

• Explain what a map actually is, as distinct from a picture
• Give TWO questions a map can answer exactly, and say which technique answers each
• Explain the difference between a four-figure and a six-figure reference, and when each is the right answer
• Explain how you can tell a steep slope from a gentle one, and why the numbers alone will not tell you
• Describe how you would turn a measurement on the paper into a real distance
• Finish by explaining one thing a photograph shows that a map does not, so the comparison is fair