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Making Maps Exercises

The exercises folder contains several sub-folders with additional map files:

  • background
  • cities
  • elevation
  • highways
  • landmarks
  • mjwater
  • parks
  • states

The four folders that will be used for this exercise are: elevation, states, cities, and highways.

Exercise 1

Open ArcMap and create an empty map. Use the yellow plus button to add in order:
  • states.shp from the states folder
  • Cities.shp from the cities folder

Based on your experience using the Symbology tab to color polygons based on an attribute, symbolize capital cities in red and non-capital cities in black.

 

Exercise 2:

Now add:

  • mjrrds.shp from the Highways folder
  • intrstat.shp from the Highways folder

Symbolize the two kinds of roads differently and change the symbology of the cities so that the size of the symbol reflects the population of the city. It's faster and easier to do this if you zoom in on a small area first so that you can see what you're doing better.

Exercise 3

Open a new blank map. Add north america elevation with shaded relief.lyr from the elevation folder. (When using this set of map layers, always begin with the elevations layer (if you're going to use it) to ensure that the map projections match. In most cases, ArcMap can mesh maps with different projection schemes on the fly, but for some reason it has problems adding the elevations layer to the other layers.) Expand the elevations layer to see the two sublayers for elevation and shaded relief. Turn them off in turn so that you can see how they work.

Experiment with other color ramps and classification schemes until you find a simple one that you like. Add in states.shp from the states folder and make it mostly transparent or nocolor. Zoom in to a hilly region, add the roads layers and notice the extent to which roads tend to be built around the peaks of hills.

 

 

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