Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on the passage below.
The story of maps
A A map is an attempt to show part of the world, in miniature, on a flat surface. Maps are among the oldest of human documents, and the urge to make them seems to be almost universal. Yet no map is ever a perfect copy of reality. To be useful, a map must leave things out, simplify what it keeps, and shrink the vastness of the land to fit a single sheet. Every map, in other words, is a selective picture, shaped by the purpose for which it was drawn.
B The earliest maps we know of were scratched onto clay tablets or painted on cave walls thousands of years ago. Many mixed real geography with belief: an ancient Babylonian map, for example, shows the known world surrounded by a great ocean, beyond which lie regions of pure legend. For much of history, the edges of the map were places of mystery, filled with imagined lands and monsters that no traveller had ever seen.
C The ancient Greeks brought a new spirit of measurement to map-making. They understood that the Earth is a sphere, and one scholar, Eratosthenes, even calculated its circumference with remarkable accuracy using only the shadows cast by the sun. Later, the astronomer Ptolemy set out a system for locating any place by two numbers — its latitude and its longitude — and drew maps on a grid of such lines, an idea that still underlies map-making today.
D Much of this Greek knowledge was lost to Europe for centuries. Many medieval European maps were designed to express religious ideas rather than to guide travellers, and often placed the holy city of Jerusalem firmly at the centre of the world. Meanwhile, far more accurate and practical maps were being produced by scholars in the Arab world and in China, who preserved and extended the science of earlier ages.
E The great age of ocean voyages created an urgent need for better maps, and with it a stubborn problem: how to show the curved surface of a round Earth on a flat piece of paper without distortion. Any such ‘projection’ must stretch or squeeze the world somewhere. The famous projection published by Mercator in 1569 solved one difficulty brilliantly, allowing sailors to plot a course as a straight line, but at a price: it badly distorts the size of the land, making countries near the poles look far larger than they really are.
F Modern map-making was transformed first by photography from aircraft and then, in our own time, by satellites orbiting the Earth. These allow the surface to be measured and recorded with extraordinary precision. Today most people carry a map in their pocket, in the form of a phone that can pinpoint their position anywhere on Earth using signals from satellites, and digital maps can be corrected and updated almost instantly.
G For all their appearance of cold accuracy, maps are never quite neutral. Every map reflects choices about what to include and what to leave out, whose names to use for places, and where to draw a border. Throughout history, maps have been used to claim ownership of territory, to plan the growth of cities, and to wage war. A map, in the end, is not only a picture of the world but also, quietly, an argument about it.