Map Reading and Interpretation Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Both are true and the reason gives the mechanism: a surveyor with a plan produces straight lines and regular parcels, whereas centuries of piecemeal clearance leave boundaries following streams, slopes and old woodland edges.

Answer: B

Crowded contours mean steep ground, and the absence of roads with a grazing symbol confirms limited use. The three pieces of evidence all agree with one another, which is what makes this interpretation reasonably secure without a visit to the ground.

Answer: C

The first two are correct. The third describes the centripetal pattern rather than the radial one, which has streams running outward from a central high point such as a dome or a volcanic cone. The two names are opposites and are frequently swapped.

Answer: D

Everything the specification excluded is invisible, and everything it generalised is approximate. The other three are all things that a sheet does in fact supply, so none of them is the limitation that actually constrains a reader working from the map alone.

Answer: A

Identifying symbols is map reading; interpretation begins when the reader asks why the features lie as they do and weighs several kinds of evidence against one another. The first is a prerequisite for the second rather than a substitute for it.

Answer: B

The symbol was decoded correctly, so the reading was sound; the reasoning built on it was not. Separating the two makes it a good deal easier to find where an argument built on a map went astray, and which step needs revisiting.

Answer: C

Correct answer: False

A single feature usually admits several explanations, and interpretation means finding the reading that accounts for the evidence together. A row of villages might be a spring line, a road, or a terrace; it is the contours, the drainage and the geology taken with it that decide which.

Answer: D

The two legs are at right angles to one another, so they form the sides of a right-angled triangle whose hypotenuse is 2 times the square root of 2, about 2.83 kilometres. Adding the legs to give 4 would be the distance walked rather than the distance home.

Answer: A

Only features present in both specifications can be compared honestly, since a feature missing from one may have been excluded rather than absent. Population and geology are not recorded, and the older survey's accuracy cannot be judged from the sheet.

Answer: B

Both are true and the reason gives the difficulty: if the later edition simply stopped recording a class of feature, its disappearance from the sheet says nothing whatever about whether it disappeared from the landscape.