Colour and Typography in Maps Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Leading is measured from one baseline to the next, so six lines at 10 points each occupy 60 points, about 21 millimetres. The point size of the type itself does not enter the calculation, which catches people who add the two figures together.

Answer: D

A substantial minority of readers cannot separate certain hue pairs, and any sheet may be photocopied or read in poor light. A second cue such as a difference in lightness, a pattern or a label makes the distinction robust.

Answer: A

The eye discounts the illumination, so a map read under daylight and under a tungsten lamp still appears to carry the same colours. It is a help rather than a hindrance, but it does not extend to the fine judgements a close legend demands.

Answer: B

Correct answer: warmer tones read as nearer or higher

Warm colours are perceived as advancing and cool ones as receding, so a hypsometric scheme running from green through yellow to brown reads as rising ground without the reader consulting the legend. The convention exploits a property of vision rather than any physical fact about height.

Answer: C

The familiar green through yellow to brown ramp assigns each altitude band its own tint. The colours are conventional rather than descriptive, so lowland shown green may in fact be desert. The scheme reports height alone and says nothing whatever about what grows there.

Answer: D

It means the land is low, and nothing more. The convention is so widely misread that map users often assume a green lowland is fertile, when the same tint covers the lowest parts of a desert just as readily as the richest floodplain.

Answer: A

It frames the map proper and separates it from the margin carrying the title, legend and credits. Anything drawn outside it is understood as apparatus rather than as part of the map itself, which is why the graticule values and the sheet number sit there.

Answer: B

The title is what a reader should meet first, and size and weight are how that priority is stated. Length, viewing distance and placement all follow from design decisions rather than driving them, and none of them would justify the emphasis on its own.

Answer: C

Each step up the A series doubles the area, so two steps double the linear dimension. Preserving the printed size of the lettering therefore means doubling the point size to 12. Leaving it at 6 would halve its apparent size relative to the enlarged map.

Answer: D

The two are independent properties, and a colour can be made more intense without becoming any lighter or darker. Treating them as linked is what produces class sequences whose steps are uneven in the very dimension the reader has been asked to judge, so the map misreports its own data.