I consider myself to be an educated person, and I knew that the Mercator projection distorted the sizes of continents on a map of the world, but until I saw the Peters Projection, I didn’t really get the degree to which the sizes are distorted. I imagine that if this map were shown to most people, they would say that it’s inaccurate. (As a couple of readers have pointed out, the map is inaccurate. It’s just not inaccurate in the same way that Mercator projection maps are. Here’s a mathematical description of how it’s skewed.)