Going Over Notes

Today we went over our notes in class and made sure that we had everything to be able to study for our upcoming test. I did have everything in my notes, but it is a lot of information and I am sort of worried I will forget some of it, so I am glad we refreshed. I know pretty much everything except for the regions and the first people to make maps, I just forget about those. But, the three types of maps are the Mercator Projection, The Peters Projection, and The Robinson Projection Map. For education we use the Mercator Projection Map, but we should actually be using the Peters Projection Map because it is not as distorted as the Mercator. All though all maps are distorted because you can't draw something that is round into something that is flat, the Peters map is much more accurate with sizes, distance, shape, etc. The purpose of maps are for navigation to get from one place to another and back. The first map of the world was made by Eratosthenes and his map did not have the Americas because they hadn't discovered and explored America yet. There is also absolute and relative location which is how accurate the position of the location is on Earth. To be absolute you would break it down to degrees and then minutes and then seconds. To be relative you are just describing the surroundings around the location and how it relates to the location. Some features on maps are keys, equator, prime meridian, degrees, and proper names. We also talked about time zones, which there are 24 time zones and every 15 degrees on a map is one hour forward or one hour back from a location. Then we got into GPS which is a great technology that can tell you the EXACT location of a place or even you, from a foot away or a thousand miles away. There is also a downside to GPS which is being tracked all the time. The last thing we talked about were the three types of regions which are, formal regions (area shares one or more common distinctive characteristics), functional regions (dominates at a central focal or nodal point that is common in an area), and vernacular regions (area the people believe exists as part of their cultural identity.