clipped from: www-personal.umich.edu Here is an ordinary map of the world:
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 and natural way of portraying geographic or social data.
Here, for example, is a cartogram that shows the human population of the countries of the world:
Cartograms are most often used to show population data, but there is no reason why they need be limited to population. They can in principle be used to show almost any quantity. Here is a cartogram of the world in which the sizes of countries are proportional to Gross Domestic Product, which is a measure of how much wealth a country's economy generates, and hence, to an extent, of the wealth of the country's inhabitants:
