"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness," said scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski. In fact, a good map has as much useful information as a book, and if it's a road map, in handy folding form.
Strangely enough, many people are befuddled by the prospect of reading a map. It helps to imagine that you're looking down on the territory a map covers as if you were in space. It also helps to learn what certain symbols on a map always mean, including the basics like a large blob of color standing for a large city and a small circle for a small town; and more advanced map-reading, such as the difference between a four-lane superhighway and a two-lane state road.
Maps are excellent for telling the distance between two points. In fact, maps generally offer more than one way to calculate miles between point A and point B, for those who know which symbols to look for and what they mean.
When calculating mileage, the first thing to look for on a road map, or even in an atlas, is a mileage table. Mileage tables are a quick way to determine mileage between any two places listed on the mileage table. Road maps tend to list major cities on their mileage tables.
Mileage tables feature both horizontal rows and vertical rows of city names. Find your starting city on the horizontal row, then look to the right, where you will see one number after another. Stop at the number that's in the vertical row under your destination city. That's the mileage between the starting city and the destination city.
But what if you want to go to a place that isn't on the mileage table? Most small towns aren't listed, after all. But there are other ways to extract the mileage information you want from the map.
All road maps have information about the distance between points on the map. Rand McNally, for example, does it the following way. Next to each road, no matter how big or small, there are black numbers. These numbers tell you the distance in miles between points on the road, either between towns, or between two junctions (intersections) of roads. There are also red arrows and red numbers on Rand McNally maps next to roads. Each red number is the mileage between two red arrows--these are usually larger numbers than the black numbers. Finding the distance between two points is then a matter of adding the numbers you see between the points.
So if you're going from city A to city B and then to town C, first check the mileage table for the distance between A and B. Then check the road between city B and town C. Add up the red or black numbers from B to C, and add that mileage to the distance between A and B. That will equal the exact mileage between A and C.
If you don't need mileage that exactly, then look at the scale of miles on the map. It will tell you how far an inch on the map equals in miles on the ground. You can then estimate distances by finding out how many inches are between points on a map. If each inch is 20 miles, for example, three inches between city A and town C on the map will be about 60 miles out on the road. But it's only an approximation, since roads aren't usually as straight as lines.
