EigoPro 2級 読解 — The History of Maps

The History of Maps A map is such a simple, everyday object that we rarely think about how remarkable it is. In a single glance, a good map can show us a whole city, an entire country, or even the surface of the planet. People have been making maps for thousands of years, and the story of how they have changed tells us a great deal about how humans have come to understand the world. The earliest maps were very different from the accurate charts we use today. Often they showed only a small, familiar area — a river, a few villages, the path to good hunting grounds. Many old maps mixed real geography with belief and imagination. Some placed the mapmaker's own country proudly in the centre of the world, while the edges, far from home, were marked with warnings of monsters and unknown dangers. These maps tell us less about the true shape of the land than about how people of the time saw their place in it. As travel and trade grew, the demand for better maps increased. Explorers crossing the oceans needed charts they could trust with their lives. Slowly, through careful measurement and the work of countless travellers, maps became more accurate. The invention of printing meant that a single good map could be copied and shared widely, instead of being drawn by hand one at a time. Step by step, the blank spaces on the map were filled in. Today, most of us carry maps of the entire world in our pockets. Using signals from satellites high above the Earth, a phone can show our exact position and guide us, street by street, to almost anywhere. Yet the basic purpose of a map has never changed. Whether scratched on a clay tablet or glowing on a screen, a map is a tool that helps us answer two of the oldest human questions: where am I, and how do I get where I want to go?

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