Surprised when looking at the world

  I have said before my wife bought me a beautiful globe. The globe drove me to  read more geographical article in wiki. My brother-in-law last months has introduced me an exciting Android game ,"blood and honor". It's a game similar to a famous board game called "Risk". What's the romance of men? Blood! I, as a general, have to fight against different regimes in order to conquer the whole world! I felt too addicted on this game that I finally uninstalled it and ended my day-dream.


Why do I talk about this game? It is because I have read an article in wiki. It ranked the countries in the world in term of area they owned. To my surprise, the land area of Brazil is larger than Australia. I have already known Brazil(8.5Mil km2) is the largest country in South America. But I don't believe it is even larger than Australia(7.6Mil km2) which is a large continent lying on the southern hemisphere. Even more, I found the land area of Brazil is comparable to U.S.(9.2Mil km2) and China(9.3Mil km2). Don't forget U.S also owns a northern chilled area called Alaska(1.7Mil km2). Alaska has been purchased by U.S. from Russia Empire at a damn cheap price in 1867. Brazil is very large indeed!

The second thing I notice is India. India(2.9 Mil km2) is far smaller than I expect. It is less than one-third of the land area of China. But the population in India exploded for years. It is the second highest population(~1.2billions) country in the world, where 1.35billions for China.

The last thing is what I am proud of. I will not get trapped in the area of Greenland (2.2 Mil km2) anymore. It is far smaller than you may expect. In my childhood, I stared on the world map in a textbook. I amazingly found that there was a super large area at the northern right corner of North-America continent. I guessed it was larger than China and even the whole south America or Africa. And Africa is the second largest continent which I learned in secondary school. Then I knew there was something wrong. What's about you? Following is the world map. And do you know why Greenland is actually so small?