Question. Re-Order the paragraphs
- One of the unsettled scientific questions in the late 18th century was the exact nature of the shape of the earth.
- This fact was established in the 1730s by French survey expeditions to Ecuador near the Equator and Lapland in the Arctic, which found that around the middle of the earth the arc was about a kilometer shorter.
- The length of one-degree arc would be less near the equatorial latitudes than at the poles.
- While it was generally known that the earth was not a sphere but an ‘oblate spheroid’, more curved at the equator and flatter at the poles, the question of ‘how much more’ was yet to be established.
- One way of doing that is to determine the length of the arc along a chosen longitude or meridian at one-degree latitude separation.
