Mercator vs Peters

Mr. Schick was not in class today so we were given the assignment to say if the cartographers made valid points in the episode of the West Wing and I think that they did. The first point they made was the relative size of many countries was incorrect. The bigger a country is shown, the more power people will give it. So Greenland was seen as a huge country when in reality it is actually very small. Also Europe was twice the size that it should be. Europe is actually much smaller than South America. The second point was that some countries were in the wrong location like Germany. This could throw many people off from what they believed the world had actually looked like. Finally, they pointed out that many people take the Northern hemisphere as greater because it is on the top. So, if you flip the map upside down then it will serve you the same purpose.