Question Numbers : (1 to 6) The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each
question.
Understanding where you are in the world is a basic survival skill, which is why we, like most species come
hard-wired with specialised brain areas to create cognitive maps of our surroundings. Where humans are
unique, though, with the possible exception of honeybees, is that we try to communicate this understanding
of the world with others. We have a long history of doing this by drawing maps - the earliest versions yet
discovered were scrawled on cave walls 14,000 years ago. Human cultures have been drawing them on
stone tablets, papyrus, paper and now computer screens ever since.
Given such a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few
hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human
history, north almost never appeared at the top, according to Jerry Brotton, a map historian... "North was
rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from," he says. "West is also
very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears."
Confusingly, early Chinese maps seem to buck this trend. But, Brotton, says, even though they did have
compasses at the time, that isn't the reason that they placed north at the top. Early Chinese compasses
were actually oriented to point south, which was considered to be more desirable than deepest darkest
north. But in Chinese maps, the Emperor, who lived in the north of the country was always put at the top of
the map, with everyone else, his loyal subjects, looking up towards him. "In Chinese culture the Emperor
looks south because it's where the winds come from, it's a good direction. North is not very good but you
are in a position of subjection to the emperor, so you look up to him," says Brotton.
Given that each culture has a very different idea of who, or what, they should look up to it's perhaps not
surprising that there is very little consistency in which way early maps pointed. In ancient Egyptian times
the top of the world was east, the position of sunrise. Early Islamic maps favoured south at the top because
most of the early Muslim cultures were north of Mecca, so they imagined looking up (south) towards it.
Christian maps from the same era (called Mappa Mundi) put east at the top, towards the Garden of Eden
and with Jerusalem in the centre.
So when did everyone get together and decide that north was the top? It's tempting to put it down to
European explorers like Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Megellan, who were navigating by the North
Star. But Brotton argues that these early explorers didn't think of the world like that at all. "When Columbus
describes the world it is in accordance with east being at the top," he says. "Columbus says he is going
towards paradise, so his mentality is from a medieval mappa mundi." We've got to remember, adds Brotton,
that at the time, "no one knows what they are doing and where they are going."
The role of natural phenomena in influencing map-making conventions is seen most clearly in