Hill shading conveys relief by
Answer: A
Modelled illumination, conventionally from the north-west, produces a shaded picture that the eye reads as three-dimensional. It conveys the shape of the land immediately but cannot be measured, so contours usually accompany it.
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Assertion (A): Hill shading is conventionally lit from the north-west even though the sun never shines from that quarter in the northern hemisphere.
Reason (R): Readers interpret a scene lit from the upper left as raised rather than hollow.
Answer: B
Both are true and the reason gives the cause: lighting from below or from the right causes many readers to see the valleys as ridges. The convention trades physical realism for a reading that comes out the right way up.
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A proportional symbol placed at the centre of an areal unit implies that
Answer: C
The symbol sits at a convenient point but stands for the total across the whole unit, which is why placement at the centroid is a drafting decision rather than a claim about location. Readers occasionally take it as the latter.
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State whether the following is true or false.
A thematic map should show as many variables as the data allow, since more information is always better for the reader.
Answer: D
Correct answer: False
A thematic map has a subject, and every additional variable competes with it for the reader’s attention. Beyond two variables the legend becomes a study in itself and the pattern the map exists to show is lost in the encoding. The discipline of thematic cartography is subtraction rather than addition - and where several variables genuinely must be shown, small multiples do it better than one overloaded sheet.
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The choice of a denominator when normalising is significant chiefly because it
Answer: A
Cases per resident measures risk to a person while cases per square kilometre measures concentration on the ground, and the two maps can look nothing alike. Naming the denominator in the title is therefore not a formality.
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Which of the following is a thematic map rather than a reference map?
Answer: B
Rainfall is a single subject whose distribution the map exists to show, which makes it thematic. The other three each set out many kinds of feature so that a reader can find things, which is the purpose of a reference map.
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The legend of a thematic map is chiefly there to
Answer: C
Without the legend the shades and symbols carry no agreed meaning at all. Publisher, orientation and scale are all recorded elsewhere on a well-made sheet, in the credits, the north arrow and the scale bar respectively.
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A map showing land use categories such as arable, pasture and woodland is
Answer: D
Correct answer: qualitative in the data it presents
Arable, pasture and woodland are categories differing in kind, not amounts differing in degree, so the data are nominal and the map is qualitative. That determines everything downstream: unrelated hues rather than a graded sequence, no class limits to choose, and no question of normalising by area - the very issues that dominate the design of a quantitative thematic map.
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State whether the following is true or false.
Every thematic map must include a scale bar.
Answer: A
A map whose purpose is comparison between units rather than measurement of distance may reasonably omit one, and a cartogram cannot carry a meaningful scale at all. The test is whether the reader is expected to measure anything.
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Data collected for administrative units are described as
Answer: B
Correct answer: aggregated data
Aggregated data are individual records summed or averaged within a reporting unit, which is what a census tract figure is. The aggregation is what creates the two problems considered elsewhere in this topic: the modifiable areal unit problem, since a different set of boundaries would give different figures, and the ecological fallacy, since the aggregate says nothing certain about any individual within it.
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