When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

If a steady stream of surveys is to be believed, declining geographic literacy is a growing threat to American security. Asked to identify Iran, for example, a surprising number of respondents put it in the Balkans. Some confused it with Greenland, and others, more inexplicably, located it Atlantis-like in the middle of the ocean. The one guy who guessed it was near Phoenix presumably wasn’t trying. Perhaps he resented being asked. Methodology matters, and if you interrupt someone during lunch demanding to know where Iran is you can’t expect them to throw down their sandwich and help you find it. Needless to say, the American Association of Geographers is upset. This, presumably, is their default state by now. They can’t really be surprised anymore, and undoubtedly also resent being constantly interrupted over meals to comment on another article about declining geographic literacy. The problem, however, goes deeper than just geography. It extends to geographic terms. Do kids these days even know what an isthmus is? I haven’t asked them. But given that I barely know how to spell it, I assume the answer is no. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. A generation of children that never learned to identify an isthmus will be hopeless when confronting a firth, much less a thalweg. Geographical Terms in Picture and Map, George Philip and Sons Limited, 1935The solution, of course, lies in looking at fake places — specifically the ones featured at the outset of most atlases and designed to demonstrate the mechanics of maps. The slice of sample terrain above comes from George Philip and Sons’ Pictorial Atlas of the World Showing Where and How People Live. Its elegant simplicity makes it an exemplary example of the example map genre. Hypothetical hills descend toward imagined islands, all laid out in a plausible if slightly