Map projection is important in the world of geography. There is no way that geographers could always work with a spherical globe every time they have to make distance measurements. The spherical globe is very important as it is the best approximation of the earth but there must also be some alternatives. This is why we have so many types of map projections. When I was young to study the French and European map, we always used the equidistant cylindrical map. This map is very useful because it is equidistant and the easiest to understand and to make measurements.
It is very easy to understand because we are working in two dimensions and we could just make straight line measurements between two cities. Even though this easiness is very attractive for working with maps, it can be quite inaccurate for actual distances because it is a poor approximation of the world. For example, if you want to fly from Washington DC to Kabul, you are not going to go straight going through France and Germany and other European countries to reach Kabul. You would actually go North to Greenland and Iceland as this is the fastest way to get to Kabul considering spherical maps.
The cylindrical view is not the only view we can use. Another very useful projection is the equidistant conic view. It is another type of equidistant projection. Here we have a view on the North pole and flatten the earth. It is very similar to the cylindrical view but the North pole is at the center. The conformal maps are more accurate than the equidistant but there are less intuitive. the Mercator and equidistant cylindrical are very similar except that the Mercator is more accurate and has more distortion. The Robinson projection is a map with spherical shape but in two dimensions instead of three. Another type is the equal area projection where countries and continents seem to have obviously an equal area. This is the least intuitive of all maps in my opinion.
As we saw above, there are many type of map projections that exist. For our class, we divided them into three groups: equidistant, equal area and conformal. We also saw that the equidistant projection is very intuitive but not very accurate while the conformal is more accurate, it is less intuitive because of the distortions. All map projections have a particular purpose: it could be for accuracy, intuition or other types such as the equal area projection. It is not very intuitive because of the heavy distortion. Any map projection has its own purpose
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