--- title: Borders: why they are where they are — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Borders: why they are where they are», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A border is a line that people agreed on, or fought over, to show where one country ends and the next begins; you cannot see it fro --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/) [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/) / Borders: why they are where they are # Borders: why they are where they are Lesson 31 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 17 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/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/0/) — A border is a line that people agreed on, or fought over, to show where one country ends and the next begins; you cannot see it from space, and the ground on both sides is usually the same. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/1/) — Some borders follow things that are hard to cross, like the high Pyrenees between France and Spain, while others are dead straight because someone drew them with a ruler on a map, often far away. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/2/) — Think of two brothers splitting a bedroom with tape on the floor: if they tape along the bunk bed, it makes sense, but if a parent tapes straight through the middle, one of them may end up with the door and the other with the window. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/3/) — In Europa Universalis 5 borders move with every war and inheritance, and that is not far from the truth, but the game shows them as sharp lines, while real borders around 1337 were often blurry zones. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/4/) — Lines drawn by outsiders, as in Africa in 1884 or India in 1947, cut through peoples, farms and families, and many of today's troubles still come from them. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/6/) — Many borders in Africa, the Middle East and North America are straight lines drawn on maps; the USA and Canada share the 49th parallel for about 2,000 kilometres. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/7/) — In 1494 Spain and Portugal agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide newly found lands outside Europe along a line about 370 leagues (a league is a few kilometres) west of the Cape Verde islands. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/8/) — The eastern bulge of Brazil lay east of the Tordesillas line, which is a main reason Brazil speaks Portuguese while most of South America speaks Spanish. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/9/) — At the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, European powers set rules for claiming African land, and no African rulers were invited. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/11/) — Colonial borders often split one people between several countries, or put rival peoples into one country; the Somali people, for example, live in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/12/) — When British India became independent in 1947, it was split into India and Pakistan, with a border drawn in a few weeks. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/13/) — About 15 million people fled across the new India–Pakistan border, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, were killed in the violence; the exact number is not known. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/14/) — Borders are not fixed forever, and the map of Europe has changed many times through wars, marriages, treaties and votes. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/15/) — Countries also have borders at sea, with territorial waters reaching 12 nautical miles (a nautical mile is a sea mile, a bit under 2 kilometres) from the coast, and fishing and mineral rights in an exclusive economic zone up to 200 nautical miles out. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/16/) — Inside most of the European Union, the Schengen Area lets people cross borders without passport checks. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/17/) — Some borders are marked by walls and fences, such as the heavily guarded border between North and South Korea. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/31-borders-why-they-are-where-they-are/18/) — Hadrian's Wall was a Roman frontier in northern England, and it does not follow today's border between England and Scotland, which lies to the north of it. - ← previous: [The Atlantic routes and the slave trade](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/30-the-atlantic-routes-and-the-slave-trade/) - next →: [Venice, the Ottomans and the Mediterranean](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/32-venice-the-ottomans-and-the-mediterranean/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)