From espressos and cappuccinos to cafe au lait and plain black, there’s a coffee out
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there for almost everyone.
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We can even visualize it on a map like this, where the color of each country represents
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how much coffee they drink per person.
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So much of the world loves coffee!
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And I agree.
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For me there’s nothing better than a morning latte.
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But for coffee to get to my favorite coffee shop, it first has to make it through a pretty
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long journey.
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We won’t go bananas and get into the full geographic story of coffee, but in 2020 coffee
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is mostly grown in the “Bean Belt,” which is -- oh I’ll just show you.
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My favorite coffee shop is much closer though -- over on Elm Street.
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From my house, take a left at the end of the street, go to the bottom of the hill, and
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take another left, past the house where the grey cat is always sitting on the porch.
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A few blocks later, there’s that beautiful garden along the side of the yellow house.
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Walk past there, take a right at the next corner, and the café is straight ahead.
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At least, that’s the mental map I follow every morning.
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We all have maps we use as tools to help us navigate or better understand wherever we are.
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And in geography, we use maps to study, analyze, and interpret spaces, places, and human-environment interactions.
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We use maps in all shapes and sizes to tell the story of the Earth.
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They’re colorful, detailed, and lots of times, difficult to fold!
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I’m Alizé Carrère and this is Crash Course Geography.
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INTRO
Definition
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Formally, a map is a symbolic representation of space, which is all the facts and features
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about a particular spot.
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Maps can be used to compare spaces (and places) on Earth and beyond or shape our sense of
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reality.
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Like, when you search “map” on the internet, this world map is one of the first things
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that comes up.
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A world map is a type of reference map.
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Reference maps can show mountains, cities, oceans, elevation -- everything people might
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say "yep, that's there."
The Problem
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But the Earth is almost spheroid, or a slightly wonky sphere.
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So this reference map also has to do the hard work of representing our three-dimensional
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world in just two-dimensions.
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Like taking the 3D Earth and squishing it onto paper or a flat computer screen.
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Imagine doing that with a tomato.
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What a mess.
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For cartographers, or map-makers, it’s a challenge with many solutions.
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They need to pick which data they want to focus on, and the type of map they pick often
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depends on what story they want to tell.
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For example, we might want to use these three maps to talk about the number of people in
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each country around the world.
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They’re thematic maps, which visualize data about a particular topic across a space.
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Instead of being something we’d use to navigate on a cross-country road trip, thematic maps
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tackle abstract ideas, like average rainfall or voting results by political party, and
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explore how frequency, concentration and patterns are distributed across a space.
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For example, these three thematic maps are designed to visualize population data.
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First, we have a choropleth map, which shows how a theme like population changes over a
Chloropleth
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particular space using different colors or shadings of colors.
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This is shown in the map’s key or legend which unlocks the map and shows us how to
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get into the map and interpret it.
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Notice how the key moves from light purple to deep violet depending on the population
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density -- the number of people per some amount of area.
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When we look at this, we can tell pretty quickly the population density in most of South America
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is quite low.
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Except for the northern tip of the continent, there are between 0 and 25 people per square
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kilometer.
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But wait.
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As of 2020, Sao Paulo in Brazil is actually one of the 20 most populated cities in the
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world.
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So nowhere in Brazil has more than 25 people per square kilometer?
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Nowhere?
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Choropleth maps are useful because they quickly tell us which countries or regions belong
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in the same category overall.
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With a glance we see Australia and Canada and Russia and most of South America all fit
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in the same population density category.
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But by shading a whole area, choropleth maps can make things look a little too simple,
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which can be a problem.
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They imply there’s an evenness to whatever they're showing -- even though there are parts
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of Sao Paulo with wayyy more than 25 people per square kilometer and other parts of Brazil
List here any words/vocabulary you hear that you don’t understand or know what they mean.
1. Geographic
2. Coffee Belt
3. Mental map
4. Human-environment interactions
5. Reference map
6. Thematic map
7. Choropleth map
8. Legend
9. Population density
10. Square kilometer
- Spheroid: A shape that is almost spherical, but slightly elongated or flattened at the poles.
- Cartographers: Map-makers.
- Thematic maps: Maps that visualize data about a particular topic across a specific space.
- Choropleth map: A thematic map that shows how a theme, such as population density, changes over a particular space using different colors or shadings of colors.