It's possible, however, and sometimes very useful, to redraw the map with the sizes of countries made bigger or smaller in order to represent something of interest. Such maps are called cartograms and can be an effective way to portray data.
To the left, for example, is a cartogram that shows the human population of the countries of the world. In this map the sizes of countries are proportional not to their actual landmass but instead to the number of people living there; a country with 20 million people, for instance, appears twice as large as a country with 10 million.
Cartograms can be useful visual representations of all kinds of data...
