Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas.
The chancellor said: "As people become more focused on the fact that this election will determine the shape of the country, and the prospects of each and every family in this country for the next 10 or 20 years, I think we will become very focused on who is saying what or, with the Tories, who is not saying what.
British politics is in such flux, even the future shape of the country is uncertain.
But over the life of this parliament we should really start rethinking the whole shape of this country.
The main winners of Tunisia's elections have announced the shape of the country's interim government ahead of the first meeting of its newly-elected assembly.
In the long term, if the process of compromise does move forward, analysts said, it is difficult to guess at the future political shape of the country.
And then another favourite problem began to tease him: how did those map-makers find out what the shape of a country was?
The American government, in the shape of the country's National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), called on the world's two leading scientific journals to censor research.
The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.
This drama is so big because it puts not just the economic and social wellbeing of a society but the very shape of the country at stake: externally, in Europe, and internally, between England and Scotland.
Slovenes joke that the shape of the country looks like a chicken fleeing east, but they actually stood their ground and won a 10-day war for independence in 1991 against demoralized troops from the Yugoslav Army.
