TOEFL iBT Practice Test 38

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Information: Taking your antibiotic capsules Take one capsule three times a day, roughly every eight hours, with a full glass of water. You can take them with or without food, but try to keep to a regular schedule. Complete the whole course even if you feel better after a few days. Do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine. If you develop a rash, swelling or difficulty breathing, stop taking the capsules and seek medical help immediately.

Every flat map of the round Earth necessarily distorts something, a geometric consequence of trying to represent a curved, three-dimensional surface on a two-dimensional plane, and cartographers have developed dozens of projections that each preserve certain properties, such as shape, area, distance, or direction, at the expense of others. The Mercator projection, devised in 1569 primarily as a navigational aid because it preserves compass directions as straight lines, has become the most historically dominant world map, yet it dramatically exaggerates the size of landmasses far from the equator; Greenland, for instance, appears comparable in size to Africa on a standard Mercator map despite Africa's actual area being roughly fourteen times greater. This distortion has drawn sustained criticism, particularly since the affected regions have often correlated with which parts of the world are visually minimised or exaggerated in ways some scholars argue reflect and reinforce outdated colonial-era perspectives on global importance. Alternative projections address this problem differently: the Gall-Peters projection preserves relative area accurately but distorts shape substantially, stretching regions near the equator into unfamiliar, elongated forms, while more recent compromise projections, such as the Winkel tripel used by National Geographic, attempt to balance multiple distortions simultaneously rather than eliminating any single one entirely. No projection can perfectly preserve every property at once, a mathematical certainty rather than a solvable design flaw, which means the choice of projection for any given map is fundamentally a choice about which kind of distortion is least objectionable for its intended use.