On Western Immappancy of Africa Very good, very well-researched illustration by Kai Krause illustrating just how mammoth Africa is. You could fit China, the US, India, Mexico, and Japan in it and still have room for a good chunk of Europe! "In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as “immappancy”, meaning insufficient geographical knowledge. A survey with 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 distorted nature of the predominantly used mapping projections (such as Mercator). A particularly extreme example is the worldwide misjudgement [sic] 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!" all-that-is-interesting/the-true-size-of-africa
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:42:31 +0000
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