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Forostar said:
Denmark has almost disappeared from the map compared to the mighty space it usually takes up, and China now dwarfs Russia instead of vice versa.
Click to expand...

Neither is entirely a correct statement. Denmark takes up virtually no space at all unless you count in Greenland, which is not usually done. Also, while Russia is significantly bigger than China (17.075.400 km² vs 9.571.302), it hardly dwarfs it - China is the fourth largest country in the world.

The map is still cool, but I personally think that this one is much more eye-opening:

true-size-of-africa.jpg
 
I object strongly to the way Europe is shown in the graphic on the right - there is a profound lack of Nordic countries there!

That being said: The main picture illustrates a good point. The most common map projection - the Mercator projection - really distorts the size of countries located at different distances from the Equator. It is a neat projection because it conserves direction - but it misrepresents area to the extent that Greenland appears to be just as large as Africa. However, the map projection can hardly be blamed if American school children believe the USA is the world's largest country, because even in the Mercator projection, it is easy to see that Russia is larger.

Now I have never thought knowledge of areas, population numbers or names of capitals is what constitutes the difference between well educated and poorly educated, but it's always fun to bash the 'Muricans with things like "X out of Y Americans think that A is the capital of B" :D I assume many Americans have a laugh at similar things coming from Europe.

And btw, Norway is not the capital of Sweden.
 
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