How is the plan different from the map? Detailed analysis

The article describes what the plan differs from the map, what their purpose is, what kinds of them are and where they are used.

Ancient times

In times immemorial, before the wide development and discovery of the continents, people began to make the first maps. Including marine. But because of the imperfection (or absence) of measuring devices, their first samples, to put it mildly, did not differ in accuracy and differed greatly depending on regions and authors. Often, due to the impossibility of creating more accurate guidelines and others, the compilers compensated for this with the decoration.

But in the Middle Ages this became a little better, especially since the advent of great geographical discoveries, cartography began to develop more and more. But how does the plan differ from the map? And what is their purpose? In this we will understand.

Map

According to the official definition, the map is an image of the Earth's surface with the location of objects, a clear definition of distance and scale. And the cards vary greatly depending on the purpose and type. Postponed to paper can be as a whole hemisphere, and individual regions of the continents.

There are three main types of them: general geographic, thematic and socio-economic.

Geographic features a clear content of the Earth's relief, height above sea level, riverbeds, seas, lakes and other.

Thematic ones are devoted to individual phenomena, regions, cities or natural areas. For example, a separate forest, a nature reserve, a site in the mountains, a tourist route or a city.

Socio-economic shows not only the area of this or that continent, but also reflect its state. For example, in terms of the number and type of cultivated crop plants, extraction of minerals or the natural zone - steppe, forest, desert, etc. Also, such cards can include political, which details the outlines of state borders, and demographic, which reflects the number of people or its increase and decrease.

With this we figured out, but how does the plan differ from the map?

Plan

The plan is not a map in the usual sense, from it it differs primarily in large scale, the lack of geographical coordinates, for example, such as meridians. Simply put, the plan shows a small section of the area with the symbols of the latter. It can be either official, with respect to the proportions of objects and distances, and self-made, not differing in actual accuracy, but faithfully conveying the meaning.

The plan and map are similar in their purpose, both are needed for orientation on the terrain, but serve different purposes. For example, the first can be a cadastral one, showing all the buildings and boundaries of land plots, or evacuation, in which people in a fire or other event leave the premises.

Also, the plan is usually drawn up in conditions when there is no possibility to resort to the map or its scale is not enough. So now we know how the plan differs from the map.

Modern technologies

With the development of the aerospace industry, mapping has greatly simplified. The thing is that satellites in orbit cope with this task perfectly, with the help of their optics one can consider even the smallest objects, and if necessary, a particular person.

For a long time, satellite maps were available only to the military, but relatively recently with the advent of the Internet, access to them was received by all comers. They are updated much more often than the usual paper ones, and it is convenient to use them. In addition to the very surface of the Earth, they bear different actual information - names of cities, house numbers with streets, data on the work of various organizations, etc.

Also worth mentioning are maps of sea currents, which serve as a guide for seamen.

Let's summarize: a map is a geographic image of the Earth with precise symbols and scale. A plan is a large picture of a section of a terrain or building, the landmarks of which can be either real or very approximate.

This is the difference between the plan and the map.