Every map is an argument about what matters. These are ten mapmakers whose arguments stuck.
A map is never a neutral record. Someone decided what to include, what to leave out, which way up to put it and which distortion to accept. Medieval European maps put east at the top and Jerusalem near the middle because that reflected what their makers thought the world was for. Portolan charts left interiors blank because their users only needed the coast. The mapmakers here span fourteen centuries and several traditions, from Ptolemy's coordinate tables to a London draughtsman who threw geography away entirely and produced the most copied diagram of the twentieth century. The explanations note what each map got wrong, since the errors were often as consequential as the accuracies.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. Listed coordinates for thousands of places and set out how to project a sphere
Why: The maps drawn from it in the fifteenth century underestimated the size of the Earth considerably. That error encouraged the belief that Asia lay a short sail west of Europe.
Answer: A. Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily
Why: The work is often called the Tabula Rogeriana after his patron. Its maps were drawn with south at the top, which was standard in the Islamic cartographic tradition.
Answer: D. Networks of straight rhumb lines radiating from compass roses
Why: They were compiled from compass bearings and sailing distances rather than astronomical observation. Their coastlines are strikingly accurate while the interiors are frequently left blank.
Answer: C. East
Why: Jerusalem often occupied the centre and the earthly paradise the top edge. Putting east at the top is where the word "orientation" comes from.
Answer: B. Martin Waldseemuller
Why: He named the landmass after Amerigo Vespucci, who had argued it was a separate continent rather than part of Asia. He tried to withdraw the name in later editions, by which point it had stuck.
Answer: A. The first modern atlas
Why: Its innovation was uniform sheets, one subject to a page, with his sources credited by name. The word "atlas" itself came from Mercator a few years later.
Answer: D. Military mapping at a time of invasion fear
Why: The name refers to the Board of Ordnance, the army body that began the survey in the 1790s. Its first published sheet covered Kent.
Answer: C. A clock accurate enough to keep home time throughout a voyage
Why: Comparing the time at a reference place with local noon gives the difference in longitude directly. Lunar distance tables were the competing method and stayed in use alongside chronometers for decades.
Answer: B. Abandoning true geography for straight lines and even spacing
Why: He was an engineering draughtsman and drew it in the manner of a circuit diagram. Almost every metro system in the world has since adopted the same approach.
Answer: A. The way it enlarges high-latitude regions relative to the tropics
Why: The Gall-Peters projection was promoted from the 1970s as a fairer alternative, at the cost of badly stretched shapes. Every flat map trades one kind of accuracy for another, and none escapes distortion entirely.
The ground beneath your feet is moving, slowly but relentlessly. One idea — plate tectonics — explains earthquakes, volcanoes…
7 min readEach correct answer awards 10 XP. There is zero point penalty for incorrect guesses, encouraging learning through exploration.
Yes! You can retake any quiz as many times as you like, or use the Practice Mistakes mode at the end to review questions you missed.
Absolutely. As soon as you select an option, QuizKite displays a detailed explanation card explaining why the answer is correct.
Every quiz on QuizKite is researched, written and fact-checked by hand against reliable references, with an explanation for each answer. Read our full Editorial Policy to learn more about our content standards.
Reading maps properly, and knowing what each one gets wrong.
The Mercator projection is well known for distorting what?
Grid references, bearings, declination and what the spacing of contour lines is telling you.
On a hillside, what does the spacing between contour lines tell you?
Ten capitals that trip up even confident travellers, from Canberra to Abuja.
What is the capital of Australia?