The mercator map is historically one of the world's most popular map projections. describe this projection. why was it created, and what kinds of distortion can you see

Because a round object is being mapped flat there needs to be some adjustment for this which the Mercator map adjusts for. In the case of this type of projection/map, as the distance from the equator increase to the north or south, the same scale (or change) accompanies an east west distance increase. Because of this consistent change, objects farther from the equator seem to be larger than those that are close to the equator. An example of this would be Greenland or Antarctica when looking at a map. The landmasses of these two areas seem much larger because the scale has evenly increased since they are the farthest from the equator.