Determine the scale of the map if the distance of 500 km is 5 cm long.

If 5 centimeters contains 500 kilometers, then there are exactly 100 kilometers in 1 centimeter. 100 kilometers is 100,000 meters or 10,000,000 centimeters (10 million centimeters). At the same time, the scale should be recorded in the form of the number of centimeters that are contained in the real area and are captured in one centimeter on the map.
Thus, the scale should be written as 1:10 000 000