How Big Is Africa


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Did anyone claim Africa is a country?

Really did you study in America or something? The guy who made the map is comparing Africa?s land mass (consist of 54 countries) to the land mass of USA, China & Russia individually rather then North America (23 countries), Asia (48 Countires, less countries but more land mass).

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Really did you study in America or something? The guy who made the map is comparing Africa’s land mass (consist of 54 countries) to the land mass of USA, China & Russia individually rather then North America (23 countries), Asia (48 Countires, less countries but more land mass).

You're misrepresenting the article and the point behind it. The comparison isn't between Africa and "individual countries" but rather Africa as a continent if it were filled with more easily quantifiable land masses of countries that are better known in the west than the African countries. How can anyone get "OMG HE IS COMPARING AFRICA TO COUNTRIES" out of this article is beyond me. Did you perhaps study in America or something?

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You're misrepresenting the article and the point behind it. The comparison isn't between Africa and "individual countries" but rather Africa as a continent if it were filled with more easily quantifiable land masses of countries that are better known in the west than the African countries. How can anyone get "OMG HE IS COMPARING AFRICA TO COUNTRIES" out of this article is beyond me. Did you perhaps study in America or something?

Owned.

There's alot of "twss" in this thread as well. Anyways. Cool article.

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I still don't get it, can you care to explain a little further.

In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as "immappacy," meaning insufficient geographical knowledge.

A survey of random American schoolkids let them guess the population and land area of their country. Not entirely unexpected, but still rather unsettling, the majority chose "1-2 billion" and "largest in the world," respectively.

Even with Asian and European college students, geographical estimates were often off by factors of 2-3. This is partly due to the highly distored nature of the predominantly used mapping projections (such as Mercator).

A particularly extreme example is the worldwide misjudgment of the true size of Africa. This single image tries to embody the massive scale, which is larger than the USA, China, India, Japan, and all of Europe ... combined!

Can you explain what he's trying to say, because as the article on the image on itself compares size of AFRICA (a continent) to the SCALE of USA, CHINA, INDIA, JAPAN and EUROPE (also a continent). My question is that if hes comparing Africa as a one plain land mass then shouldnt have compare it with Eurasia as a whole since its also a plain as Africa (also not mention Afro-Eurasia).

FYI: I did not study in US.

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Don't worry about it. He's just using other places, yes countries, to show the size of Africa, to help show the true size of it.

It doesn't matter if he's comparing it with countries, continents or the size of your balls. It's a visual aid.

:)

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Can you explain what he's trying to say,

I'll try. He's not saying "look, all these countries fit into Africa", and whether they are countries or continents is irrelevant.

What he is doing is graphically demonstrating how big Africa is, using countries whose populace think they have a fairly good idea how big they are. He is concerned with the lack of geographical knowledge being shown in an American study, and thought his picture/diagram was a good way of a) addressing this particular issue, and b) highlighting the general problem by publicising this image.

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Thank you for explaining, now 2 thing first even with the published image of the world you can tell that Africas big there's no question (if some people can't find that true then I don't get it). Second I thought everyone new that American kids are dumber than a door knob.

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Really did you study in America or something? The guy who made the map is comparing Africa's land mass (consist of 54 countries) to the land mass of USA, China & Russia individually rather then North America (23 countries), Asia (48 Countires, less countries but more land mass).

Seriously? 23 Countries? Oh - i guess they include "Central American" countries in the North American continent.

Eitherway, i've never seen the Petronas towers and showing how many Volks Wagen Beetles it can hold. Surely the better comparison would be to show how tall it is compared to other tall buildings in the world (Empire State, World Trade Center (before), etc) but what if i've never seen those buildings in person. Their scale doesn't translate well then either. If you however told me that you can fit 20,000 Toyota Camrys, City Bus or something in that building then that's probably some scale i can imagine.

Comparing Antartica to Africa to Asia doesn't give me any size of scale other than one is bigger than the other. Showing them like this blew my mind as i was thinking the USA is probably 1/2 as big as the continent. They did the same thing for China too and the country itself is freaking huge when shown in that light!

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Ohh "Location: NYC Area" nevermind

Just joking.

Funny guy, surely i know how big those buildings are but what if i was from Trinidad and never been to the USA? Surely i've seen the buildings on TV plenty of time but the scale doesn't translate there well.

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Really did you study in America or something? The guy who made the map is comparing Africa’s land mass (consist of 54 countries) to the land mass of USA, China & Russia individually rather then North America (23 countries), Asia (48 Countires, less countries but more land mass).

Yeah, to give people the idea how big the continent is. Using examples like that is an extremely effective way to make people understand, as "11.7 million square miles" won't mean anything to most. Apparently you don't seem to grasp that.

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It's the same as the well known comparison of Sun and Earth, 1.3m Earths would fit inside our Sun.

And then comes the asshat "BUT NO !!! THE SUN ISN'T THAT BIG LOL, BETELGEUSE IS WAY BIGGER".

And then the next one, "LOL CANIS MAJORIS IS WAY BIGGER".

Seriously, no one gives a **** how "unfair" his comparison was, it got the point across and into the minds of people who clearly didn't realize that Africa was THAT big.

Hell lots of people still think of "Africa" as a country. Imagine that.

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