--- title: Directions, latitude and longitude — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Directions, latitude and longitude», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Every place on Earth has an address made of two numbers: latitude, how far north or south of the equator, and longitude, how far east --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/) / Directions, latitude and longitude # Directions, latitude and longitude Lesson 2 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/0/) — Every place on Earth has an address made of two numbers: latitude, how far north or south of the equator, and longitude, how far east or west of Greenwich. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/1/) — Latitude has a natural zero, the equator, halfway between the poles; longitude has none, so in 1884 the world agreed to start it at Greenwich in London. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/2/) — Latitude was easy for sailors: the higher the Pole Star stands in the sky, the further north you are, a trick Portuguese captains used as they crept down Africa's coast. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/3/) — Longitude was so hard that ships were wrecked for centuries, until John Harrison's sea clock let a captain compare London time with local noon. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/5/) — The four cardinal points are north, east, south and west, and adding north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west makes eight. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/6/) — A compass points to magnetic north, which is not the same place as the North Pole, and it has been drifting from the Canadian Arctic towards Siberia by tens of kilometres a year. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/7/) — Latitude measures how far north or south of the equator a place is, from 0 degrees at the equator to 90 degrees at each pole. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/9/) — Longitude measures how far east or west a place is from the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich in London and was agreed at a conference in Washington in 1884. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/10/) — Lines of longitude, called meridians, run from pole to pole and all meet at the poles, so one degree of longitude is about 111 km wide at the equator but shrinks to nothing at the poles; at London it is only about 69 km. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/11/) — In the northern hemisphere, the height of the Pole Star above the horizon in degrees is roughly equal to your latitude. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/12/) — For centuries sailors could not find their longitude at sea, until John Harrison built an accurate marine clock, his H4 watch, which was tested at sea in 1761; the Earth turns 15 degrees every hour, so each hour between London time and local noon means 15 degrees of longitude. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/13/) — The Tropic of Cancer lies at about 23.4 degrees north, the Tropic of Capricorn at about 23.4 degrees south and the Arctic Circle at about 66.6 degrees north; these lines come from the Earth's tilt of about 23.4 degrees (90 minus 23.4 is 66.6). - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/14/) — London lies at about 51.5 degrees north and 0.1 degrees west, so a pair of numbers can locate any place on Earth. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/15/) — The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west everywhere on Earth, because the Earth spins from west to east. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/2-directions-latitude-and-longitude/16/) — In EU5 the far north has cold, harsh locations and the tropics hot ones, which follows latitude quite well (the further from the equator, the lower and weaker the sunlight), though real climate also depends on seas, winds and height. - ← previous: [Maps and scale](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/1-maps-and-scale/) - next →: [Projections: why Greenland looks huge](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/3-projections-why-greenland-looks-huge/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)