Page:Maury's New Elements of Geography, 1907.djvu/10

6 direction. Let us now see how we learn about distance.

View of a broad valley in Maryland. Notice how distance affects the size and appearance of objects.

Very often we do not need to be exact. It is enough to know that a place is "very far off" or "very near." But sometimes we must know just what the distance is. To find out this we measure.

How do we measure? We measure with foot rules and yard sticks and tape measures. You know how long an inch is. Twelve inches are called a foot. Three feet make the measure that we call a yard. Five and a half yards make what we call a rod.

With these measures we can easily find out short distances We can see how long the schoolroom is, or how long and how wide the playground is.

But for very long distances we must have very long measures; and so we call the distance of 320 rods one mile. We can walk a mile in about twenty-five or thirty minutes. So if it takes us half an hour to walk from our home to school, the distance is about a mile.

1. Pictures.—We have now been talking and thinking a great deal about direction and distance. In this lesson we will try to understand how they are shown to the eye. To show them