The World Factbook ~ mapfocus

The World Factbook

IMAGE Deep Information FOR The World Factbook's PictureThe map above is a political map of the world centered on Europe and Africa. It shows the location of most of the world's countries and includes their names where space allows.Representing a round earth on a flat map requires some distortion of the geographic features no matter how the map is done. We have used a Mercator projection for this map because it is the projection most commonly used in schools. On this map, geographic boundaries that trend north-south appear as vertical lines, geographic boundaries that trend east-west appear as horizontal lines. This type of projection causes a minimum of country-shape distortion near the equator, a small amount of distortion at mid-latitudes, but extreme distortion near the poles. For that reason, the map does not extend to the north and south poles.