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Sunday, July 15, 2012

The true size of Africa in relation to other countries


 
 
 
I've discussed before how I think the geographic knowledge of American's in general is pretty poor... and the above graphic does a great job at showing just how large Africa is, which appears quite small on most maps, as evidenced below, due to Eurocentric map projections aimed at reducing distortion in northern latitudes (where most land mass is).




Anyway, I found the above illuminating, so I thought I'd reshare it after seeing it posted online. Based on the table in the graphic, Russia (as the largest country in the world) has about 11% of the Earth's landmass, meaning it is about the size of half of Africa (yet looks much larger in most map projections).