Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
3. Find a view in which the Earth appears to be almost all water. Reflect on how much of earth is
covered by water. 2 Now find the continent of Europe.
It's pretty hard to understand, from visual inspection, if the word “continent” has any physical meaning
at all, just how Europe and Asia were ever considered separate entities. This may be the first major
indication that human beings divide land up in strange ways. But read on. It does get better.
4. Click country.shp, which you will find in
[___]IGIS-Arc\Other_Data\Countries
And wait. And, depending on the speed of your computer, wait some more. If you get tired of waiting, click
the map. When a black screen finally appears, click it once. Look around.
Here you should see the divisions human have recently imposed on the land masses. They have divided
up planet Earth into areas for reference and jurisdiction (a generous way of describing the results of,
mainly, wars and political strife over millennia). Now, perhaps more than ever, it takes documents and time
to cross many of these division lines.
5. Click countries.lyr. Look at the Globe View of this, then shift to Geography in the Preview drop-
down menu. Examining the coordinates in the lower right of the window, what would you say the
coordinate system of countries.lyr is? _________________________________. Zoom in on your
country. Start the identify tool and click the country to bring up the Identify Results window.
Set it so that All Layers will be identified. Determine the populations of your country and two
or three around it, according to the data presented. Look at some other countries. What is the
monetary currency type used in Mexico? __________________. Is Bolivia (latitude 18 o south,
longitude 65 o west) landlocked according to Identify? _____________________. How many
square miles are there in the United States? ______________________. What population is
listed for Antarctica? ________________.
6. Zoom back to the full extent. Note the distortion in areas well south of the equator. For
instance, in most of South America the distance covered by a degree of longitude is much less
than a degree of latitude. The most dramatic example is Antarctica, where a single point (the
South Pole) becomes a line several times the width of the United States, which itself looks
pretty squashed.
7. Look at the table for countries.lyr. How many countries are there, according to this table?
__________.
We begin now to look at more rational ways of dividing up the landscape.
Looking at Reference Systems
8. In the Catalog Tree contract the ArcGlobeData entry. Expand Reference Systems. Here are
10 plus ways of dividing up the planet's surface that are scientifically, if somewhat randomly,
2 Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything , comments on how fortunate it is that the earth is bumpy, which
allows for land masses. He says that otherwise there might be life, but there wouldn't be baseball.
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search