Grid and Bear It - Geography - page 28

Full names, please. You must use the full name of each road in Gridville and each line
on the global grid. Again, the absolute location of the hospital is the intersection of South 1st
Street and West 1st Avenue. Now suppose you had told that stranger, “The hospital's at the
corner of 1st Street and 1st Avenue.” Well, if you look carefully at the map of Gridville, you
find four locations where a 1st Street crosses a 1st Avenue. Obviously, the potential for loc-
ation confusion here defeats the purpose of absolute location. The remedy is to use the full
name of each grid component.
Figure 3-2: The
basics of the
global grid
The naming game
While the Gridville grid consists of real roads, the global grid consists of imaginary lines of
latitude and longitude (see Figure 3-2). Latitude lines go across the map — latitude comes
from the Latin latitudo, meaning breadth, or the measure of the side-to-side dimension of a
solid. Longitude lines run from top to bottom — longitude comes from the Latin longitudo,