The other day a kid came to me,\u00a0embroiled in a conflict.\u00a0 One adult had told him lines of longitude\u00a0lie north to south, while another\u00a0one had told him\u00a0“north and south is latitude.”\u00a0 Understandably, he was confused.\u00a0 What’s more, kids have a way of believing the adult they last<\/em> talked to, rather than the one in front of them presently.<\/p>\n Luckily, I wasn’t either of the two adults he’d already talked to.\u00a0 Therefore, it was easy to explain to him that\u00a0both those adults, in fact, had been right.\u00a0 As so often happens, he thought they’d been telling him opposing\u00a0views, when really they’d been telling him the same truth but in different ways.<\/p>\n As the first adult said, lines of longitude do\u00a0lie <\/em>north to south.\u00a0 However, they don’t measure <\/em>how far north or south you are.\u00a0 How far north or south you are is measured by your latitude, as the second adult pointed out.\u00a0 Of course, lines of latitude\u00a0lie east to west.<\/p>\n “Think of a football field,” I told the kid.\u00a0 “The yard lines\u00a0lie\u00a0sideways across\u00a0the field, but they don’t measure how far sideways you are.\u00a0 Rather, they measure\u00a0how far forward you are.\u00a0 They\u00a0lie <\/em>sideways, but they measure <\/em>your forward position.\u00a0 If you’re at 80 yards, it means you’ve crossed <\/em>all the\u00a0yard lines up to 80.\u00a0 Running forward, you\u00a0cross<\/em> them because\u00a0they lie across<\/em> your path rather than parallel to it.”<\/p>\n It’s the same with longitude.\u00a0 If you’re at 30\u00b0 East, it means you’ve crossed<\/em> the longitude lines from 1\u00baE through 29\u00baE, to land on the 30th one.\u00a0 Going East, you\u00a0cross\u00a0<\/em>those lines of longitude\u00a0because they lie\u00a0North to South.\u00a0 If they ran East to West, then going East, you’d just stay on the same line forever.<\/p>\n In a similar way, lines of latitude lie<\/em> East to West, but they measure <\/em>your position north or south.\u00a0 Note,\u00a0for example, the Equator:\u00a0 it’s at 0\u00ba latitude, yet obviously it runs East to West around the globe.<\/p>\n Although these ideas are obvious to anyone familiar with maps, they can be tough to grasp at first.<\/p>\n Well, the story has a happy ending.\u00a0 After\u00a0explaining longitude and latitude to the kid, I told him to find the position of Moscow for me.<\/p>\n “Around 37E, 56N”, he reported five minutes later.<\/p>\n Good enough:)<\/p>\n