Blog post #2

Today's key question was "How do geographers describe where things are?" Well, this was able to be answered by completing the learning objectives. For example, one of these objectives was to define cartography, maps, absolute location, and relative location. The definition of cartography is the science of map making and the definition of a map is a two dimensional or flat scale model of the Earth or a portion of the Earth. Without cartography, maps wouldn't be able to be created, and without  maps, geographers would not be able to locate things, giving geographers no way to find things in the world, let alone describe where they are by finding the absolute and relative locations on the map. The definition of absolute location is the location of a place based on a fixed point on Earth. For example, latitude and longitude. And finally, the definition of relative location is the position of something based on its location with respect to other locations. These types of locations can help geographers describe where things on a map are because they can give a more detailed description. For example, describing where America is as "It's between two continents" makes America much harder to find than saying "America is right under Canada and Above South America on the western side of the Earth in between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans," or "America is 56 degrees latitude and 106 degrees longitude from Canada." The second learning objective was to describe the two ways geographers use maps. These two ways were to find an objects absolute and relative location which we already established help geographers to describe things with more detail, and to use maps as a communication tool to convey what human activities and physical features are happening around the world. Using maps as a communication tool can help geographers to reach everyone and describe to them the situations in other countries because almost everyone can have access to a map where they liv and can see the descriptions anytime. The final learning objective was to describe the progression of early world maps. The main progression was that maps changed from a tool to get from place to place to things that can describe what other countries are experiencing, whether its population growth, a rise in lifespan, etc. geographers can describe where things are and what is happening in the world by one universal piece of paper, a map.