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Road Scholar Test Exchange 2013

For any previous road scholar participants do I need to know about township and range when it comes to PLSS? The wiki only says that the township and range are located on the bottom and side neat lines of the quad.

I would say you should, because it's an important part of PLSS, and it's not a super involved concept, so they're quick points if you ever encounter them on a test. They're basically like longitude and latitude for public surveys.

In the PLSS, each survey has a horizontal base line (analogous to the equator) and a vertical principal meridian (analogous to, well, the Prime Meridian). The rest of the survey is then split up into a rectangular grid by supplementary survey lines. Each resulting block (or township) then has a township number and a range number that designates its position in relation to the base line and principal meridian. These numbers are formatted in very similar ways:

Township: Township X (North or South), where X is the amount of rows above or below the base line. e.g. Township 7 South would designate that the township is in the seventh row south of the base line

Range: Range Y (East or West), where Y is the amount of columns east or west of the principal meridian. e.g. Range 13 East would designate that the township is in the thirteenth column east of the principal meridian.

In topographic maps, these are often shortened to three-character codes, such as T7S or R13E. They mean the exact same thing, it's just a shorter way of writing it. Also note that if a row or column touches the base line or principal meridian, then it uses a number of 1, not 0.

Here and here are a couple good sites for PLSS info. There are others too that may easily be found through your preferred search engine.

EASTstroudsburg13 wrote:I would say you should, because it's an important part of PLSS, and it's not a super involved concept, so they're quick points if you ever encounter them on a test. They're basically like longitude and latitude for public surveys.

In the PLSS, each survey has a horizontal base line (analogous to the equator) and a vertical principal meridian (analogous to, well, the Prime Meridian). The rest of the survey is then split up into a rectangular grid by supplementary survey lines. Each resulting block (or township) then has a township number and a range number that designates its position in relation to the base line and principal meridian. These numbers are formatted in very similar ways:

Township: Township X (North or South), where X is the amount of rows above or below the base line. e.g. Township 7 South would designate that the township is in the seventh row south of the base line

Range: Range Y (East or West), where Y is the amount of columns east or west of the principal meridian. e.g. Range 13 East would designate that the township is in the thirteenth column east of the principal meridian.

In topographic maps, these are often shortened to three-character codes, such as T7S or R13E. They mean the exact same thing, it's just a shorter way of writing it. Also note that if a row or column touches the base line or principal meridian, then it uses a number of 1, not 0.

Here and here are a couple good sites for PLSS info. There are others too that may easily be found through your preferred search engine.

Thanks, it'll come in handy, escpecially since I know I'm going against 2 9th graders that have been in this event all 3 years and are pretty good

Just changed my division to C, I miss road scholar. Regarding PLSS, make sure you can do the map drawing. If you can do that quickly and correctly, after practice of course, you should have a thorough understanding of the event.

Could someone explain UTM to me?
Edit 1: the coach says UTM won't come up on tests. Have any of you had tests with UTM?

General Information about UTM

It's just another way of pinpointing a particular point on a map. It's kind of an alternative to latitude/longitude. If you have any further issues, feel free to ask.

With the governement shut down, the USGS site is also down....does anyone know where else they can get maps to jump start the road scholar preparation?
tks.
M

We just got some stuff from Otherworlds-edu.com. Came with 3 tests, hwy maps, and 3 topographical maps. Really good.

We have just started this event. Looking at the topographical symbols for intermittent lakes and dry lakes. They look identical except the outline of the dry lake is a different color. Is that it? So if we see a lake with dots the same color as the outline, that's an intermittent lake, right? Thanks!