Longitude and Latitude

When you tutor social studies or geography, you’ll likely have to explain the concepts of longitude and latitude.  Now, we will.

The other day a kid came to me, embroiled in a conflict.  One adult had told him lines of longitude lie north to south, while another one had told him “north and south is latitude.”  Understandably, he was confused.  What’s more, kids have a way of believing the adult they last talked to, rather than the one in front of them presently.

Luckily, I wasn’t either of the two adults he’d already talked to.  Therefore, it was easy to explain to him that both those adults, in fact, had been right.  As so often happens, he thought they’d been telling him opposing views, when really they’d been telling him the same truth but in different ways.

As the first adult said, lines of longitude do lie north to south.  However, they don’t measure how far north or south you are.  How far north or south you are is measured by your latitude, as the second adult pointed out.  Of course, lines of latitude lie east to west.

“Think of a football field,” I told the kid.  “The yard lines lie sideways across the field, but they don’t measure how far sideways you are.  Rather, they measure how far forward you are.  They lie sideways, but they measure your forward position.  If you’re at 80 yards, it means you’ve crossed all the yard lines up to 80.  Running forward, you cross them because they lie across your path rather than parallel to it.”

It’s the same with longitude.  If you’re at 30° East, it means you’ve crossed the longitude lines from 1ºE through 29ºE, to land on the 30th one.  Going East, you cross those lines of longitude because they lie North to South.  If they ran East to West, then going East, you’d just stay on the same line forever.

In a similar way, lines of latitude lie East to West, but they measure your position north or south.  Note, for example, the Equator:  it’s at 0º latitude, yet obviously it runs East to West around the globe.

Although these ideas are obvious to anyone familiar with maps, they can be tough to grasp at first.

Well, the story has a happy ending.  After explaining longitude and latitude to the kid, I told him to find the position of Moscow for me.

“Around 37E, 56N”, he reported five minutes later.

Good enough:)

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.

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