5 Maps And Charts That Will Surprise You

In the article, “5 Maps and Charts That Will Surprise You” by Ezra Klein, the chart showing Africa in comparison to some other countries, was subtitled “Africa is much bigger than you think”. This subtitle is a little bit misleading since most people know that Africa is a massive continent. For hundreds of years, people have thought that Africa is much smaller than it actually is, according to most world maps. According to “5 Maps and Charts That Will Surprise You” by Ezra Klein, “Most maps you see are based on the ‘Mercator projection’, so named for Gerardus Mercator, who came up with it in 1559… Under the Mercator projection, for instance, Africa looks to about the same size ass Greenland; it’s actually 14 times larger,” (Chart 3). The chart
shows the outline of Africa with Greenland, the United States, China, India, and Western Europe inside it. I decided to do a little bit of my own research on the topic. Here is what I found. “A New Chart of the World on Mercator’s Projection with the Tracts of the Most Celebrated & Recent Navigators”, By Henry Teesdale, 1844, showed Africa, which was right under Greenland, and was shown to be the same size. I then looked up world maps in general. What I found made me think. Pretty much all of the maps displayed on Google Images showed Africa as a very large land mass. When I asked a few of my peers if they had ever thought that map makers had been fooling them, they all said they knew that Africa was very, very large.
In response to the article, I think the particular chart was misleading to readers since the majority of people already know that Africa is very big. The subtitle, “Africa is much bigger than you think”, makes people think that Africa is even larger than they think it is.