Countries Losing the Most Area to the Mercator Projection

I did! That's fun!

looks like a new update for perfect scores! Lovely change :D

Surely it's all relative - so you could calculate it only in terms of countries gaining land if you wanted to, or only in terms of countries losing land, or anywhere on the scale in between

Level 66 and not knowing about map projections? :skull:

I didn't understand that either.

See Universewalker's comment

The quiz felt a little backward to me. Mercator maps try to normalize the land masses to determine east/west distance from Greenwich. Meaning the northern/southern land masses get stretched, map-wise out to maintain longitude perspective with the equator. Those that lose mass are nearer the equator. It's all kind of weird, but somewhat essential to know for seagoing navigation when GPS fails and all you have are paper charts and a pencil. :=)

One pill makes you larger,

And one pill makes you small.

(And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all.)

Go ask Alice

When she's ten feet tall...

Doesn't every country lose area, on every conceivable projection, on account of the map having to fit in room? More seriously, it presumably depends on what is preserved for scale - total area (land or combined) or distance between a specific pair of points. To me, the most natural comparison is [percentage of area on mercator map]/[percentage of surface area of a globe]. But that runs into the issue of how much Antarctica gets included at the bottom of the map.

I'm not quite sure what there is to not get, but this is the maths of scales:

The Earth has a surface area (Et), countries have surface area (Ec).

A map has a surface area (Mt), each country projection will have an area on the map (Mc).

Mt / Et is the scale of the map (S).

If a country is projected at the 'correct' size on the map, then Mc / Ec = S. However, some will be larger and some will be smaller. The % in the quiz is the % difference between the S and the actual value based on the country's projected size.

It is impossible for every country to 'gain territory' on any map, unless the projection shrinks the oceans. All contents of a map fill 100% of the map in the same way that all contents of the real thing fill up 100%. If some things increase in proportion, others must decrease.