Why are latitudes and longitudes measured in angles?

Answer 1

Because that is the way that Earth was shaped and measured in degrees of longitude and latitude in a spherical way which makes up 360 degrees. The degree of the line of longitude and latitude is divided into 60 minutes ( ' ) and each minute is divided into 60 seconds ( " ). It can become a pinpoint to a location on a map.

Answer 2

So that you can specify locations that are more and more exact. For example, time zones are 15 degrees of longitude each. At the equator, the time zones are a little more than 1,000 miles wide. Fifteen equally spaced degree markers spread over 1,000 miles doesn't give you a lot of precision.

Answer 3

1). Because they are arcs on the surface of a sphere (the Earth).

2). In the case of longitude, the linear distance between two longitudes is

not constant, but actually depends on the latitude at which you measure it.

The reason for that is that all of the longitudes scrunch together as you get

farther from the equator, and they all converge in a single point at the north

and south poles.

One degree of longitude along the equator is a linear distance of about 69 miles.

But at 89 degrees latitude, the same 1 degree of longitude is a linear distance of

about 1.2 miles.

Answer 4

Any location on Earth is described by two numbers--its latitude and its longitude. If a pilot or a ship's captain wants to specify position on a map, these are the "coordinates" they would use.

Actually, these are two angles, measured in degrees, "minutes of arc" and "seconds of arc." These are denoted by the symbols ( °, ', " ) e.g. 35° 43' 9" means an angle of 35 degrees, 43 minutes and 9 seconds (do not confuse this with the notation (', ") for feet and inches!). A degree contains 60 minutes of arc and a minute contains 60 seconds of arc--and you may omit the words "of arc" where the context makes it absolutely clear that these are not units of time.

Calculations often represent angles by small letters of the Greek alphabet, and that way latitude will be represented by λ (lambda, Greek L), and longitude by φ (phi, Greek F).

Additional answer

And the reason that degrees are used is because we are talking about positions on a sphere, and these positions are related to (for longitude) the position relative to the Greenwich Meridian (O0) or (for latitude) relative to the Equator. Since a circle is 3600, degrees tell you how far you are from those lines - not in miles but in degrees. A degree will have a different effective length in different parts of the world, more near the Equator than near the poles.

Answer 5

They are used because the Earth is Spherical so linear measurements are impossible. They are based on the assumption of a perfect sphere, and are measured from the 'geographic center' of the Earth.

Answer 6

For the same reason that the numbers used to describe your height, your

brother's height, and your father's height need something else besides feet.

If "foot" was the only unit you had, then all three of you might measure the

same number.

When you need to describe a location on Earth, the "degree" is a large unit. If you

give a person the latitude and longitude of the place where you want him to meet

you, and you can only tell him the degrees, he could go to a place that might be as

much as 90 miles away from where you are. So you need to be able to break the

degrees down to pieces that are smaller than a whole degree.

Remember that the coordinates ... latitude and longitude ... are angles. So the

smaller pieces that were used originally were the same old divisions for angles:

1/60 of a degree, called a 'minute', and 1/60 of a minute, called a 'second'.

You can learn to get used to these units, with some effort. They do the job for you

if you happen to burying a treasure chest, or hiking, or navigating a pirate ship.

But if you have to do math with them, they're totally miserable. Whenever a

person has the latitudes and longitudes of two places, and he has a pencil and

paper, a GPS receiver, or a computer, and he wants to calculate the distance

between the places, or the direction to go from one place to the other, either

he or his machines will always change the degrees/minutes/seconds into a

good old decimal number to do the math with.

Here's how to do that:

Decimal number for a latitude or longitude = (Degrees) + (Minutes/60) + (Seconds/3600)

Answer 7

That's a lot like asking "How do you use inches to measure the marks on a ruler ?"

-- Locations on the Earth are measured in angles from certain starting places.

-- Any point on earth can be completely pinned down with a set of two numbers ...

its latitude (the angle north or south of the equator), and its longitude (the angle

east or west from the "zero" line).

-- The zero line for longitude is an imaginary line that everybody agreed on

about 200 years ago. It joins the north and south poles and passes through

the Royal Observatory outside of London. That's zero longitude. The imaginary

line is called the "Prime Meridian".

-- Since the latitudes and longitudes of locations on Earth are angles, they're

described in units of angles, and those are 'degrees'.

Answer 8

probably because we can determine where the equator is and everything is either north or south of that line and with the earth being a sphere degrees like in a circle make sense.