Were you taught to read a map?

Yes - Geography at grammar school, including the reading of the OS maps.

Boring, I thought. But I later got interested in maps and did Geography.

Nothing much to do with the staple crops of Venezuela, etc, though.

There was one where you could destroy the only McDonalds on the Moon. (PDP-11/GT40 graphics)

My geography teacher said that corned beef was so called because the cattle was fed on corn (maize). (Apparently it means something completely different in the US.)

And I did so many times. There was a GT40 sitting on a trolley in the middle of the office, when I was a postgrad.

Yes, very different. And in the US, the story is that the salt used to preserve the meat, came in very large grain(corn)-like crystals. It can be confusing, though because in US markets, tinned UK-style corned beef is on the shelf, labelled 'corned beef', which isn't at all like the 'corned beef' sold in the meat department.

Corned beef has meant beef preserved with salt for hundreds of years, and that is still the meaning in America - nothing to do with maize. The current British meaning referring to canned chopped beef is much newer.

-- Richard

Obviously not the GT40 which I knew about - that was a Ford sports car.

I was taught how to read an OS map in the late 70s or early 80s.

Does one just look at the map that's available and any key that's with the map and then one knows what's what?

Not sure what aspect of it would need to be taught?

You would need to memorise the key - or at least the symbols that you were most likely to find useful - and that may require testing to prove that you had learned it. In particular you need to know about changes in map standards over the years - the one that springs to mind is that 1:50,000 maps sometimes don't distinguish between single- and multiple-track railways (even though the key still shows examples of both symbols), whereas 1" and

You'd need to be shown how to take a grid reference, including interpolation to the nearest 1/10 of a grid square, and the two ways of quoting a grid reference: either prefixing a six-figure reference with the 100-km-square letters appropriate to that map, or else by using the small superscript digits on the grid markings at the corners of the map to prefix the two halves of the 6-figure reference - for example: York Minster is either SE603521 or 46034521.

You'd need to know how to read the contour lines: that they are at intervals

But I agree that a lot of the basic principles of a map can be gleaned simply by comparing the map with the key.

That's part of what needs to be taught. It might be obvious to you and me.

Some people need to be taught what alphabetical order is, and that words in the dictionary are in that order.

Owain

I must have been taught that at some time; I've no idea when and by whom. Most road atlases use a simpler system based on page numbers.

Not really important for motoring.

Quite so.

I was waiting for someone to say that! Presumably the DEC one stood for Graphics terminal - it was a PDP-11 with a separate display processir with its own instruction set, and shared memory.

It means "salted".

Even in the UK, "corned beef" is salted.

Not in a corrie or cwm they are not

Get an allotment now you can't go gallivanting around in your car. Then you may find such things a bit more relevant. Roots, beans, brassicas, roots, beans, brassicas. That's the mantra.

A map is only useful if you know where you are to start with.

Not the case when you are lost.

Finding your your current position using compass bearings, triangulation,sextant ETC.

Well, you wouldn't start from there. That would be silly.

I was taught that in second or third form, ~1962. There was an exercise to determine if two points were intervisible by plotting the contours on an intercept line. We were also taught what all the symbols meant and how to orient the map. I love maps too, especially the old OS 1":mile series, printed on cloth-backed paper and concertina folded. They were very durable and easier to refold than the modern plain paper kind.