Directions and symbols

The small city's map has four arrows at the top right. They point to the four cardinal directions (also called cardinal points): north at the top, and then, going round clockwise like the hands of a clock, east, south and west.

Some children remember the four names with the word NEWS (North, East, West, South). That helps with the names, but be careful with the order: going round clockwise it is always north, east, south, west.

Between them are the intermediate directions: northeast (NE), southeast (SE), southwest (SW) and northwest (NW). Each one sits exactly between two cardinal points, and its name tells you which two.

Most maps simply have one arrow marked 'N', pointing north. One arrow is enough, because once you know where north is, the other seven directions follow.

Symbols are the third component. The city map has small drawings of real buildings, but on the map of a large city or a country there would not be enough space to draw them all. Instead, a symbol stands for each feature: symbols for kinds of buildings (a railway station, a school, a post office), for roads and railway lines, and for natural features such as a river, a pond or a forest. In this way many details fit into the small space of a map.

To make maps easy for everyone to read, mapmakers use fixed symbols. Different countries use different sets. In India, the Survey of India, a government body, has fixed a set of symbols for maps of India. Among them are symbols for broad-gauge and metre-gauge railway lines, a railway station, metalled and unmetalled roads, and international boundaries. Because they are fixed, anyone who learns them can read any Indian map.