How come the Nile flows up? American geography literacy: why the Nile seems to flow up
One ten-year-old asked this in a classroom. The teacher lost her temper, and the whole class paid for it. The question was not silly. It points at a puzzle that has followed a whole country for decades.
The Nile runs downhill. It also runs toward the top of the map.
A teacher pulled down a wall map of Africa. A child asked why the Nile was flowing up. Every kid knew water only runs down, so the class thought they had caught the teacher in a mistake.
They had mixed up two words. On a wall map, north is drawn at the top, so the Nile, which runs north to the Mediterranean Sea, looks like it climbs. In real life it falls from about 1,134 metres near its source to sea level.
The Nile is about 6,650 km long by the most common count. Sources disagree by a few hundred km depending on where you start measuring.
The teacher could not explain it. Was she the only one?
Up on the wall is not up in the world
Heights are the commonly quoted source elevation. The Nile's exact source is still debated (Rwanda or Burundi).
It was not one classroom. Three big tests found the same hole.
In 1988 the National Geographic Society hired Gallup to quiz about 10,820 adults in nine countries. People had to find places on a blank map. American adults finished near the bottom, and Americans aged 18 to 24 finished last of all.
The U.S. was the only country where the youngest adults did worse than the oldest. In 2002 a new survey found little change. In 2006, 63% of young Americans could not find Iraq on a map, even though U.S. troops had been there for three years.
Sources disagree on how many Americans could not find their own country in 1988: 14% in the Education Week report, 18% in another summary. We show the lower figure. Percentages for New York and Mississippi come from news reports of the same 2006 survey and are marked as approximate.
More kids took geography classes by 2002. So why did scores barely move?
2006: share of Americans aged 18 to 24 who found each place on a blank map
Sample: 510 people, interviewed Dec 2005 to Jan 2006 (Roper for National Geographic). Soft bars are estimates from press reports. Source: CBS News, Education Week.
Maybe geography was taught as a list. It is really a set of questions.
People have offered jokes and theories. One joke blames the end of free gas station road maps. A more serious suspect is dull teaching, with textbooks that call a country a "formal region" and a city hub a "functional region."
The numbers fit this idea. In 2002, 55% of young Americans said they had taken a geography course, up from 30% in 1988. Scores barely improved. More classes did not help much if the class felt like memorising.
Geography starts with three old questions: Where am I? How do I get there? What is on the other side of the mountain? Weather, oceans, rocks, money and power all grow out of them.
Nobody has proved the cause. Education experts argue about teaching, travel, language study and news habits. Those who took a course did better in the 2002 survey.
What does a place actually teach you? Look at one city on the edge of a desert.
Geography is the hub. Everything else is a spoke.
Fields listed in the book's introduction, in plainer words. Source for the 2002 course figures: Education Week.
A map dot becomes a story: why Timbuktu got rich
Memorising "Timbuktu is in Mali" is easy and tells you nothing. The better fact is where it sits: on the southern edge of the Sahara, a short way north of the Niger River. Desert travellers and river traders met there.
Camel caravans carried salt south from desert mines. Gold, ivory and other goods came north. People were also bought and sold there, and the city became a slave market. The same crossroads also made Timbuktu a centre of learning, with a famous mosque-school at Sankore and a busy book trade.
Dates for Timbuktu's founding and for Sankore are disputed. Sources say 11th or 12th century for the town, and place Sankore anywhere from the 10th to the 16th century. Distance to the river is given as 9 to 20 km.
If place explains this much, what happens when the map itself misleads us?
Where desert meets river, trade met too
Schematic, not to scale. Sources: National Geographic, Britannica.
On most maps, Greenland looks as big as Africa. It is 14 times smaller.
The usual world map is the Mercator map, made in 1569 for sailors. It keeps compass directions straight, which helps ships. To do that it stretches land far from the equator.
Greenland is about 2.17 million square kilometres. Africa is about 30.37 million. The picture on the wall tells your eyes the opposite.
Maps change how big a place feels in your head. That is why one drawing can shape what people think matters.
Africa's area is quoted between about 30.2 and 30.4 million km2 depending on the source. The "14 times" figure is widely used and holds across them.
A map can be wrong and still be useful. How did people ever learn to spot the difference?
Greenland and Africa: how they look vs how big they are
Hatched bar shows apparent size, not a measurement. Sources: Geography Realm, AllAfrica.
Think like a geographer: look closely, then doubt the easy answer.
For centuries people looked at the horizon and saw the edge of the world. It looked flat, so they believed it was flat. Others noticed that ships do not shrink away, they sink, hull first. That only happens on a curve.
Some moments shake the picture hard. Marco Polo came home from Asia. Magellan's crew sailed around the world. Lewis and Clark mapped new land for the United States. Borders in Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were redrawn in 1990 to 1992.
Dates are the ones commonly given. Several of these, like the end of the Soviet Union, were slow processes that ended on a single formal date.
Today we can see any place in seconds. Does it still matter where things are?
Moments that redrew the world in people's heads
- 1295Marco Polo returns to Venice from Asia
- 1522Magellan's expedition completes the first trip around the world
- 1804 to 1806Lewis and Clark map the lands of the Louisiana Purchase
- 1990East and West Germany unite
- 1991 to 1992The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia break apart
Dates from standard histories; not individually sourced for this story.
The world feels closer. Borders still decide who fights whom.
When the Berlin Wall opened, East Berliners went looking for the diapers and burgers they had seen on West German TV. Chains like McDonald's now sit in cities all over the world. It is tempting to think place no longer matters.
In 1996 the columnist Thomas Friedman half-joked that no two countries with a McDonald's had ever gone to war. Then NATO bombed Serbia in 1999, and Russia fought Georgia in 2008 and invaded Ukraine. Each side had the chain.
Friedman called it tongue in cheek. Defenders say it points at a real link between trade and peace. Critics say it fails often enough to count as a joke, not a law.
If distance does not stop wars, what is the real lesson of the map?
The "Golden Arches" claim vs the record
Sources: TIME, ASPI Strategist, City AM.
Up is just a habit. The kid was right to wonder.
The Nile does flow north, and the teacher was right. The child's mistake was small: "up" on a wall is only where mapmakers agreed to put north. On a globe in space there is no top.
The famous 1972 Apollo 17 photo of Earth was first taken with the south pole at the top. It was flipped later to match what people expected. That is the whole lesson in one picture.
The same habit of seeing is what we need on bigger things. What happens to forests in Brazil or coal fields in China reaches people far away. Knowing where things are is how you see how they connect.
The "habit of seeing" point is our interpretation. The photo's original orientation is documented on Wikimedia Commons and in NASA records.
Earth as the astronauts first saw it
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Apollo 17, original orientation. Wikimedia Commons file page (author and licence listed there)
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Six numbers to carry out of here
adults quizzed in nine countries in the 1988 survey
Education Weekpercent of Americans who could not find the U.S. in 1988 (one summary says 18)
Education Weekpercent of young Americans who could not find Iraq in 2006
CBS News, Roperpercent who had taken a geography course in 2002, up from 30 in 1988
Education Weektimes: how much bigger Africa is than Greenland
Geography Realmkm: the length of the Nile, which flows north, not up
Britannica