Africa

"The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it."
-George Kimble, Geographer

In a post last year I looked at different ways to flatten the globe onto a flat map in World Maps. The standard Mercator maps that everyone uses exaggerates the size of the Northern Hemisphere so America and Europe look much larger than they really are. So ingrained is the Mercator map in our mental image of the world that we fail to recognize how large Africa is. Here is a great graphic showing Africa's true size - bigger than the US, China, India and Europe combined.

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The full size of the graphic can be found at http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg