Paragraph on “The Size and Shape of the Earth” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

The Size and Shape of the Earth

There was a time when man believed that the earth was flat and if one was to walk to the edge then he or she would fall off into oblivion. These myths existed for a long time till the first explorers proved otherwise. today man has seen the Earth from outer space and from the Moon and ye are sure of its shape. In the earlier days when man realised that the earth was round, there arose a need to find out it’s size. For the first time n 250 B.C. a man called Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference. In Alexandria he measured the angle between the outer end of the shadow of a monument and the top of that monument and found that an angle of about 7° was formed, he concluded that the Sun’s rays were reaching Alexandria at an angle of 70, at the same time the Sun’s rays were falling straight in Aswan in Egypt because they were not casting a shadow. It was clear that the distance between the point at Aswan and Alexandria was about 7 degrees of the Earth’s total circumference of 360°. He concluded that the Earth had a circumference of about 46,000 km. He was not too wrong since modern mapping techniques proved it to be 40,076 kms.