LESSON 4 Reading a Map

Suzanne is a big fan of Carlton Fisk, the great catcher who played with both the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox baseball teams. When she traveled with her family, she looked for places that might have “Fisk” in the name. One summer, her family was planning a trip to Alabama. She looked in an atlas at a list of the names of towns and found that there was indeed a Fisk, Alabama. Next, she looked at a map.

Suzanne had a very difficult time locating Fisk. If you were with her, how might you help her? What do you know about the way maps and atlases work that would aid in finding Fisk?

Suzanne's mother pointed out that it is possible to use the numbers on the map in the same way Suzanne had used a coordinate system in school. When Suzanne looked up Fisk again in the atlas index, she paid attention to the ordered pairs following the name. She found (5, 6). Suzanne also learned that a lot of maps use a combination of letters and numbers as a coordinate system. On another map, for example, Fisk might be named as (E, 6).