# The Mercator Projection and Its Critics

IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Matching headings, Table completion, Sentence completion

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## The passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the passage below.

**A** Anyone who has tried to press the peel of an orange flat knows that a curved surface will not lie on a table without tearing or stretching. Every mapmaker who wants to show the whole Earth on paper or a screen faces the same problem. In 1827 the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss proved that the surface of a sphere cannot be unfolded onto a plane without distorting distances, so a perfect flat map is impossible, not merely hard to draw. Each map projection, the rule that turns positions on the Earth into points on a page, must therefore choose what to give up. It can keep areas in their true proportions, or it can keep angles and local shapes correct, but no map can do both.

**B** The most famous of these choices was made by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator. In 1569 he published a large world map whose Latin title presented it as corrected for the use of sailors. Its value lay in the way it handled direction. A ship that holds one compass bearing follows a curving path across the planet, known as a rhumb line, yet on Mercator's map that path is drawn as a straight line. A navigator could lay a ruler between two ports, read off the angle and keep to it for the whole voyage. To make this work, Mercator placed the lines of latitude further and further apart towards the poles. He never explained how he worked out the spacing, and accurate tables for constructing the projection were first published by the English mathematician Edward Wright in 1599.

**C** The cost of this convenience is size. Because the stretching grows with distance from the equator, land in high latitudes looks far bigger than it is. Greenland appears about as large as Africa, although Africa is roughly fourteen times its area; in fact Greenland is smaller than the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. The poles cannot be shown at all, since they would lie infinitely far from the equator. None of this troubled sailors, but in the nineteenth century the Mercator became the usual projection for commercial and school maps. John Snyder of the United States Geological Survey later warned that when it is the main world map students see, its exaggeration of area leads to mistaken ideas.

**D** Specialists had complained about this for decades, but the issue reached a wide public only in 1973, when the German historian Arno Peters held a press conference in Bonn to present what he called a new world map. It showed every country at its correct relative area, so Africa and South America looked large and Europe noticeably smaller. Peters argued that the Mercator map, made during an age of European expansion, encouraged people to see wealthy northern nations as more important than poorer ones nearer the equator. The argument persuaded many socially concerned groups, including church organisations and campaigning magazines, and his map is still promoted by UNESCO.

**E** Professional cartographers responded with hostility. They pointed out that the design was not new: James Gall, a Scottish clergyman, had described the same projection in 1855, and several other equal-area projections were far older. Peters also claimed that his map kept shapes free of serious distortion, which was untrue. Critics noted an irony as well: the region his map showed with the least distortion was the middle latitudes, including Peters's own Germany, while the low latitudes, home to many poorer countries, were badly misshapen. Even so, the experts had no wish to defend the Mercator either. In 1989 and 1990 seven North American geographical organisations adopted a resolution rejecting all rectangular world maps, a group that included both projections.

**F** One influential publisher looked for a middle way. The National Geographic Society had used the Van der Grinten projection for its world maps since 1922, but in 1988 it switched to a design by the geographer Arthur Robinson. Robinson had created it in 1963 at the request of the map publisher Rand McNally. He said he had worked backwards, first picturing the best-looking shapes and sizes and only then finding a formula to produce them. The result is neither equal-area nor shape-preserving, and it draws the poles as lines rather than points. In 1998 the society changed again, choosing the Winkel tripel projection, which Oswald Winkel had proposed in 1921. Its name comes from the German word for triple, because Winkel aimed to keep three kinds of distortion low: those of area, direction and distance.

**G** Just as atlases were leaving Mercator behind, the internet revived it. After Google Maps adopted a version called Web Mercator in 2005, it became the standard for online maps and is now used by most large map services. The reason is practical. Because the projection keeps small shapes nearly true, a user can zoom smoothly from the whole world down to a single street, and at that scale the distortion of the world view hardly matters. In 2018 Google changed its desktop version so that, fully zoomed out, the Earth appears as a globe. The argument is not over: in September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly backed a resolution, introduced on behalf of African states, calling for wider use of equal-area maps where the comparative size of continents matters.

## Questions

### Questions 14-20: Matching headings

The passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings.

- **i** Sailors slow to trust an unfamiliar chart
- **ii** An old projection finds a new home online
- **iii** Why every flat map involves a sacrifice
- **iv** A map promoted as a remedy for global unfairness
- **v** Governments agree on one standard world map
- **vi** A straight line that keeps a ship on course
- **vii** Two attempts by one organisation to find a balanced design
- **viii** Specialists question both the originality and the accuracy of a rival
- **ix** How enlarging the far north and south misleads
- **x** Measuring the true size of the continents from space

14. Paragraph A

15. Paragraph B

16. Paragraph C

17. Paragraph D

18. Paragraph E

19. Paragraph F

20. Paragraph G

### Questions 21-24: Table completion

Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Projection | Origin | Main features
Mercator | Gerardus Mercator, 1569 | a route on a single compass bearing appears straight; made to help **(21)** _____
Gall-Peters | first described by James Gall in **(22)** _____; made famous by Arno Peters from 1973 | every country is shown at its correct relative area
Robinson | Arthur Robinson, 1963, for Rand McNally | a compromise based on appearance; the poles are drawn as **(23)** _____
Winkel tripel | Oswald Winkel, 1921 | aims to minimise errors of size, bearing and **(24)** _____; used by National Geographic since 1998

### Questions 25-26: Sentence completion

Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

25. At the end of the 1980s, several professional bodies in North America formally opposed the use of any _____ map of the world.

26. Since 2018, a person using Google Maps on a desktop computer who zooms out completely will see the Earth shown as a _____.

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