Thematic maps

In the year 1700, there were a lot of people living in Europe, India and China, but rather few people in America. 200 years later there were many more people in the world, and a lot of them had settled in the eastern half of North America. During the 20th Century, populations increased primarily in China and India. Did you follow that? Do you think you will remember all that text when the film has ended?

It’s often difficult to remember that which is only narrated with words. Perhaps it’s easier if we add an image. A map. Here is a world map that shows how the population of the earth was distributed in the year 1700. In the white areas there were hardly any people at all, while the red areas show where people lived.

The darker the red colour, the more people in the same place. Dark red areas are densely populated. The map has large red areas in Europe, India, and China. A lot of people lived there in the year 1700. America is almost all white.

It was sparsely populated. This is what the corresponding map looks like for the year 1900. The red areas are larger, darker, and more numerous. This means that there were more people in the world at this time, and in North America, several densely populated areas had developed. This map shows where people lived in the year 2000.

Primarily it’s in China and India that the areas become a darker red. This is where the big change took place between the years 1900 and 2000. The populations of China and India grew quickly. Three population maps, and they tell us exactly what we said at the start of the film, when you only heard words, without pictures. Is it easier to remember now?

Do you think these maps help you remember where people lived in 1700, 1900, and 2000? The three maps have a theme, in this case demographic statistics. They are thematic maps. There are other themes. This map doesn’t show demographics, but weather.

It gives us a quick and simple image of what the weather will be like tomorrow. In the south it looks like it will be sunny. In the east, it’ll be rainy, and in the central parts there’ll be storms and thunder. Here is a map where the countries of the world have various colours, so that we can easily separate them. It’s a map that shows states - that is administrative, or political divisions.

It is a political map. Political maps are used not only to show countries but also to show different parts of the same country. Here are the administrative divisions within a country. It’s a political map of all the country’s regions. This map is really colourful.

Is it also a political map? No, several countries next to each other have the same colour. The map shows what sport is the most popular in each country. Green is football. That’s most popular over almost the whole world.

But it is not the number one sport everywhere. Australia, India, and Pakistan have a red colour. Red, that’s cricket. And what is this? The blue areas show where great white sharks have been observed.

They live in many parts of the world, along coasts in all continents, except Antarctica. We can use maps to describe lots of different things in Geography, History, Biology, or any other subject there is. Maps can help us to quickly understand and remember things that are hard to tell with text. Try for yourself to explain the content of the maps in this film using only words.