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It’s my friend’s birthday. He loves the outdoors, so we’re going camping and I’m taking this birthday cake in the shape of a mountain!

He’s given me this map to show the way to the campsite, but it’s really hard to understand.

He’s written names next to everything on the map, but instead of making it clearer, it looks too cluttered!

It would be clearer with symbols instead of words. Instead of using the word campsite, we could use the symbol for campsite.

And instead of writing car park, we could use the symbol for car park.

If we change all the other things to symbols, it makes it easier to understand.

We’ll need a key to show what the symbols mean. I still need to show where the hills are.

This where contours come in.

Contours are lines drawn on maps that join places of the same height.

They can be used to see the shape of the land.

Look, I’ll show you using the birthday cake.

First, I’m going to slice my mountain cake up horizontally at different heights.

Then, if we look at it from above we can see what the contours would look like.

We can see where the slope is the steepest, the contour lines are closest together.

And where the slope is shallow, the lines are far apart.

If I add contours to the map, I can see where the hills are and how steep they are.

You don’t always need cake to explain geography but it helps!