Tsongas Industrial History Center
Classroom Activities

How to Read a Topographic Map

This activity complements the Tsongas Center's newest offering, Water under Fire, an environmental history program especially for grades 8 - 12. In Water under Fire, students explore the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution through hands-on activities and walking or boat tours. (For information, call the Tsongas Center at 978-970-5080 or email Beverly_Perna@uml.edu.) Because students in the Water under Fire workshop use groundwater tanks and MODFLOW computer modeling to investigate contamination problems, practice in reading topographic maps is valuable.

Contour Lines

The drawing illustrates how coutour lines work:

The top of this drawing is a coutour map showing the hills that are illustrated at the bottom.

On this map, the vertical distance between each of the countour lines is 10 feet.

1. Which hill is higher, hill A or hill B?
   
   
2. Which hill is steeper, hill A or hill B?
   
   
3. How many feet of elevation are there between contour lines?
   
   
4. How high is hill A? Hill B?
   
   
5. Are the contour lines closer on hill A or hill B?

Tsongas Industrial History Center | Classroom Activities | Lowell National Historical Park