Working out where places are relative to each other without seeing a map can be surprisingly difficult…
A little quiz on English towns
On Sunday evening, I had an idea for a quiz. Given an English town, you have to name the nearest city from four options.
I figured it’d be pretty easy to compile. Just pick a few well-known towns, then write down the nearest city and pick out three others relatively nearby for the multiple choice.
Yet for each question, I found myself having to check. Even with Chesterfield, which I live about 15 minutes away from and should have been absolutely certain about.
The results show that I’m not alone in my uncertainty. At the time of writing this post, the average score of the people who’d taken the quiz is 46.27%.
The trickiness of relative geography
This tallies with other quizzes I’ve written about relative geography. Ask people to pick the next country along a coastline, identify which city is furthest west or work out which European countries border each other, and the success rate is surprisingly low.
Even people who profess to love geography and maps – and I’m one of them – struggle with these sort of relative placement tasks. Our mental maps aren’t as strong as we think they are.
Brains vs maps
I’ve a suspicion that this is because the human brain fundamentally thinks in different terms to the ones used in mapping. We think in terms of forwards, backwards, right and left – not north, south, east and west.
Similarly, we don’t mentally compute distance. We use the proxy of the time required to travel that distance.
If I’m travelling to London from Sheffield, for example, I think I’m travelling south for about two-and-a-half hours. I genuinely don’t know what the distance is, other than it’s probably between 100 and 200 miles.
Looking at the map, it turns out it’s 168 miles and I’m travelling south-east.
Creating those mental maps
Given it’s a journey I’ve done many times, and I like maps, I should do better than this, right? But my personal experience is going downwards for a certain time, not in a certain direction for a distance.
I think this might be why our ability to place things relative to each other on a mental map is so shaky. It’s theory vs practice, 2D vs 3D. Pictures have to be drawn in the mind and they’re not a precise replica.
This is what makes matters of relative geography such good quiz questions. You might be pretty sure that Vienna is east of Berlin and that the Grand Canyon is to the south of Las Vegas, but you can never answer with 100% certainty.
