Scale drawing

When an architect makes plan¹ or blueprint of a house, his drawing is much smaller than the actual house. The plan is reduced in size to fit the paper he is using. This process of reducing in size is called drawing to scale. The reduced drawing is known as a scale drawing.

In a scale drawing each line is a definite fractional part of the line it represents. A line in the scale drawing may be one-half of the line it represents, one-forth of it, one-hundredth, one-thousandth, or any other definite part of it. In a scale drawing the scale may be written: 1´´/4=1´. This means that every ¼-inch length on the scale drawing represents a 1-foot length of the original object.

A scale drawing has the same shape as the original, but not the same size. Thus, we say that scale drawing is similar to the actual object.

The maps printed in history or geography books are also scale drawings with all distances in the same ratio to the corresponding distances in the original. For example, on a map the scale may be given as 1´´/2 = 50 miles. On another map the scale may be 1´´-1000 miles. This means that the actual distance between two points which are 1½ apart a map whose scale reading is 1´´/2=50 miles, is 150 miles.

Note:

¹ to make a plan – составлять план, зд. чертить план