ELEMENTARY GEOGRAPHY Part Two: What things mean on a map When you draw your first map, you will probably draw things the way they appear visually. For example, if you draw a map of your school and the area around it, you may find yourself drawing trees around it that look like trees. That's fine. The way maps normally work, however, there are these things called symbols. Symbols are pictures or markings that represent the things you are trying to show on a map. That means that on a map, your school doesn't look exactly like your school. It is represented by a symbol that shows where the school is in relation to other buildings and streets. Let's say you were looking at a map of your hometown. Chances are, black lines symbolize roads. Blue lines symbolize rivers. The color green might symbolize a park. Individual dots might symbolize houses. A fireman's hat might symbolize the fire station. That sort of thing. Some of the things that might be shown on a map are not actually things that you can see. Take, for instance, the map of your hometown. One of the things a map of your hometown might show is the city limits, or the place where the town begins and ends. But there is no actual line, or fence, at the city limits. It's an invisible boundary. A map of Buttermere Here's a map we found of a lake in England called Buttermere (nice name, eh?). Look closely at this map. The color blue symbolizes water; the big body of water in the middle is Lake Buttermere, and the blue lines are creeks that pour into Lake Buttermere, or out of it. The gray lines symbolize roads. The red broken lines symbolize foot trails. There are other symbols here and there. Can you guess what they mean? Actually, you don't need to guess. You see the section of the page in the lower right corner? That's called a key, and it is the part of the map that explains what symbols mean. One more thing about maps we'll explain before we move on: Long ago, mapmakers came up with four cardinal directions -- north, south, east and west (often abbreviated N, S, E and W). These directions don't change. "True" north, in other words, is in the exact same direction right now as it was 1,000 years ago. See if your teacher, or your parent, can explain to you which direction is north, south, east and west. In general, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west (although with the seasonal changes, it does get a bit more complicated than that). You might also see if your teacher or your parent can show you a compass. A compass is a magnetic tool whose arrow always points north (actually, it points to magnetic north, which is slightly different than true north, but we'll explain that when you get to high school). Get a compass and walk around with one and you'll see what we mean. You can walk in a circle all day, but the needle of a compass will always point the same direction. This is is the way most maps of South America are shaped, with north at the top... Most maps are arranged in a way that north is at the top, south at the bottom, east on the right, and west on the left. Why is this? Most people never even think about this question because they are so used to seeing maps where north is at the top and south on the bottom. The real reason maps look this way is because mapmaking started in Europe and that is the way the earliest maps were made. ... but if you rearrange the map so that south is at the top, look how different the map looks As you can see from these two maps of South America, the direction you choose to orient your map -- or the direction you pick to make north, south, east and west -- greatly affects the way maps look. And there is no law or rule that says you have to orient maps a certain direction. Once you feel like you understand what a map is, let's move onto the next section, where we draw a map of Tennessee. Click here.