Mapping Space

Have you ever used GPS maps in your car? Or to find your favourite restaurant nearby your location? Do you know the basics of mapping space behind it? Well, let’s find out in the section below.

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What are Maps?

Maps are used to locate particular places like home, school, river, etc.A map is different from the picture.

Mapping Space Around Us

How do we read maps? What can be concluded and understand while reading a map? What information does a map have and what it does not have? Is it any different from a picture? In this section, we will try to find answers to some of these questions. For example, how far your school is from your home? Now let’s see the distance between your home to school.

Drawing a Map

This map is drawn by me. We use different line segment for the different segment. A longer line segment is drawn for longer distances and shorter line segment are drawn for a shorter distance. Now we draw the map with a scale, symbols and mentioning distances has helped to read the map easily.

The actual distance is denoted by 1cm for 1km in the map. What can be concluded from the above illustrate? When we draw a picture, we attempt to represent reality as it is shown with all its details, where a map shows only the location of an object, in the relation of other objects.

Conclusion

• How far is my home from my school?
• The distance between my home and supermarket.
• The distance between my friend’s house and supermarket.
• How far is my friend’s house from my school?
• The distance between my school and supermarket.

All above questions can be answered in two ways. The first method is we can user ruler to know distance on the map and multiply number with scale, for example like 5cm, in this case, is equal to 5km. In the second method is we can read marked distance long the tracing path and add them all.

Thus we say that use of certain symbols has helped us to read the map easily. It is observed that the distance shown on the map is proportional to the actual distance.

Solved Examples For You

Q1. Look at the given map of a city:

Colour the map as follows:

• Light Blue – Water Park
• Red- fire station
• Orange- library
• Yellow- School
• Light Green- Park (C.P)
• Pink- College
• Purple- hospital
• Brown- hotel
• Black- Market
• Dark green- community centre
• Dark blue- Police station(P.S.)

Ans:

Q2. Draw a street route from the library to bus depot.

Ans: The shortest route from the library to bus depot is –

Move from the library towards the north and take a right turn from the locality and go straight passing from the primary school, fire station and City Park. In the front of the lake is our bus depot.

Q3. Which is further east, the city park or the market?

Ans: Between the market and the city park, the city park is further east.

Q4. Which is further south, the primary school or senior secondary school?

Ans: Between the primary school and the senior secondary school, the senior secondary school is further south. Thus we observe that the effective use of colours has made easy to find the respective locations and we can also find the path where we need to travel.

Q5. What is space?

A5. Generally, space is considered as an endless three-dimensional magnitude where matters and events have relative position and direction. We often consider physical space in three aligns dimensions, though modern physicists generally consider it, with time, to be part of an endless four-dimensional continuum known as space-time.

Q6. Is anyone in space now?

A6. The Crew of the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft: NASA astronaut Drew Morgan, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexender Skovortsov. All these three astronauts arrived at the ISS on 20th July and will return to earth sometimes in between December or January.

Q7. What is space made of?

A7. The outer space is not entirely empty – it is a hard vacuum that contains a low density of particles, principally a plasma of hydrogen and helium as well as electromagnetic radiation, neutrinos, dust, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields.

Q8. How old is space?

A8. A universe with a low density of matter is older than a matter-dominated one. However, in 2012, WMAP estimates that the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. Besides, in 2013, Planck measure the age to be 13.82 billion years.