All Flat Maps Lie

Did you know that flat maps are actually distorted?  Boys in grade VII recently conducted an experiment with grapefruits to test this theory.  Mr. White challenged the boys in his geography class to do the impossible – take a spherical shape, a grapefruit, and flatten it completely, keeping the peel in one piece.  Boys drew maps on their grapefruits and then started cutting and peeling.  They were inventive with their approaches, but no one was able to make his spherical map lie completely flat.  It seems that Mr. White was right.  Flat maps do not show accurate, unaltered representations of the globe.