A continent is one of several large landmasses on Earth. They are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criterion, with seven regions commonly regarded as continents they are Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia.
Continents are understood to be large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water. Many of the seven most commonly recognized continents identified by convention are not discrete landmasses separated by water.
The criterion large leads to arbitrary classification greenland, with a surface area of 2,166,086 km2 is considered the world largest island, while Australia, at 7,617,930 km2 is deemed to be a continent.
Likewise, the ideal criterion that each be a continuous landmass is often disregarded by the inclusion of the continental shelf and oceanic islands, and contradicted by classifying north and south america and asia and africa as continents, with no natural separation by water in either case.
This anomaly reaches its extreme if the continuous land mass of europe and asia is considered to constitute two continents. The earth major landmasses are washed upon by a single, continuous world ocean, which is divided into a number of principal oceanic components by the continents and various geographic criteria.
A map is a visual representation of an area a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions.
Many maps are static two dimensional, geometrically accurate representations of three dimensional space, while others are dynamic or interactive, even three dimensional.
Most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale Brain mapping, dna mapping, and extraterrestrial mapping.
Maps of the world or large areas are often either political or physical. The most important purpose of the political map is to show territorial borders the purpose of the physical is to show features of geography such as mountains, soil type or land use.
Geological maps show not only the physical surface, characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines.
Maps that depict the surface of the earth also use a projection, a way of translating the three dimensional real surface of the geoid to a two dimensional picture.
The best known world map projection is the Mercator projection, originally designed as a form of nautical chart.
Airplane pilots use aeronautical charts based on a lambert conformal conic projection, in which a cone is laid over the section of the earth to be mapped.
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