Map Skills
This part of a map explains what symbols, colors, or lines mean.
What is a legend or a key?
This ocean touches the eastern side of Africa.
What is the Indian Ocean?
This is a long period of time marked by important events or changes, with no start or end date.
What is an era?
A period of 10 years.
What is a decade?
This imaginary line divides Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
What is the Equator?
This type of map shows boundaries like countries, states, or cities.
What is a political map?
This ocean touches both Asia, Australia, North America, and South America.
What is the Pacific Ocean?
A line that shows events in the order they happened.
What is a timeline?
A period of 100 years.
What is a century?
This line divides the Earth into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
What is the Prime Meridian?
This type of map shows natural features such as mountains, rivers, and valleys.
What is a physical map?
This continent is connected to both Europe and Africa by land.
What is Asia?
The study or arrangement of events in the order they happened.
What is chonology?
A period of 1,000 years.
What is a millennium?
This kind of location says the exact coordinates of a place on Earth, measured in degrees of latitude and longitude, or a physical address.
What is absolute location?
This map focuses on one topic, like climate, population, or rainfall... or ghost towns!
What is a thematic map?
These imaginary lines run east–west and measure distance north or south of the Equator.
What is lines of latitude?
This event happened earlier: 500 BC or 500 CE.
What is 500 BC?
Dates labeled “AD” meaning “in the year of our Lord,” can also be labeled with this abbreviation.
What is CE, or Common Era?
This type of location describes where a place is in relation to other places.
What is relative location?
This book contains many maps, often grouped by themes, regions, or topics.
This type of map shows rivers, valleys, lakes, and mountains.
What is a physical map?
Observation or Inference: "Most people live in the northern hemisphere because there is more land averrable."
What is an inference?
Historians often use “BCE” and “CE” instead of these two traditional labels.
What are "BC" and "AD"?
These imaginary lines are also called "parallels."