Ir al contenido principal

COUNTRIES´ SIZE

We have spent our entire lives looking at the wrong map: the Mercator projection,which is the most frequently one used on the world maps. It enormously distorts the size of the countries or territories closest to the poles (essentially, those that are in the northern hemisphere) and, in comparison with it, it minimizes those that are closed to Ecuador, especially, South America and Africa.  That explains why we have been mistakenly thinking that Greenland is similar in size to Africa, when in fact it is fifteen times smaller!

[Mercator projection of the world]
Moreover, a new projection to measure the countries was used at the beginning of the eighties in order to solve Mercator projection´s problematic: Gall–Peters projection. However, it was a terrible idea because it incurred a series of topographical errors.

[The Gall–Peters projection of the world map]

This distorting effect is inevitable due to the Earth is a sphere and not a disk, as some people believe. Therefore the world map is a bidemensional projection of that sphere. According to the size of the countries, we can observe how European countries are clearly overrepresented in relation to the neighbouring countries, but at the same time they are reduced in relation to those that are in the  north. Thus, Spain seems much bigger if we compare it on equal terms with Scandinavia, but it becomes a trifle when it is located between the equatorial countries, such as Brazil or India.

Due to this problematic that shows the maps, I would like to share "The true size of..." webpage. From my point of view, I consider really interesting this webpage because it brings closer the real size of all the countries of the world to the reality and also, this helps us to compare the extension of different countries. Finally, I would also like to share a picture that represents the areas of all the world´s countries and it organises them according to their sizes.


TOP 10 Biggest countries in the world by area (measured in square kilometers of land area.)
  1. Russia
  2. Canada
  3. United States of America
  4. China
  5. Brazil
  6. Australia
  7. India
  8. Argentina
  9. Kazakhstan
  10. Algeria
FUN FACT! 
These ten countries together suppose the 49% of the Earth´s surface.  

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

EVOLUTION OF THE ELECTORAL STATISTICS IN SPAIN

We are facing an electoral panorama very uncertain and, in turn, numerous since there are several elections around the corner. To help voters get an idea about what the Spanish population thinks, surveys are carried out and graphic representations are formed from that. In order words,  statistics are essential in the electoral process . For instance, this is the last survey that collect the voting intenention and what political party will be voted by Spanish citizens. Statistics has been always present in the election period and to illustrate this reality, I would like to expose some significant data collected from the election results from the last decades. The average participation has been 73.79% since 1977, while the year 1982 was the year with the highest participation ( 79.97% ) and on the contrary it was the year 2016 when fewer Spanish people went to vote at the the polls on election day ( 66.48% ) Moreover, the PSOE was the political party with more seats...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

THE EFFECT OF MEASUREMENT IN MUSIC

Does it exist any connection between mathematics and music?, and if so, how does it affect us? As surreal as it turns out, the relationship exists. To understand it, we have to go back to ancient Greece, specifically Pythagoras. He was who discovered the importance of numbers in music and the relationship between this discipline and mathematics. The word mathematics comes from the Greek word μάθημα, which means "knowledge". Pythagoras and his followers divided this science into four areas: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and MUSIC . For this reason, we could affirm that the Pythagorean philosophers were the ones who laid the foundations of our current music. Nowadays, mathematics has to do even more with acoustics than with composition and the use of mathematics in composition is historically limited to the simplest operations of measuring and counting. As a result of that, we could affirm that we feel emotions and feelings through songs because of...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS

As it was explained in the previous entry, "CURIOUS NBA STATISTICS",  statistics is "a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data". The application of statistical procedures dates back to the year 3050 before Christ , when a register of population and wealth was carried out in Egypt in order to prepare the construction of the pyramids. Later, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans also carried out some censuses with tributary, social and military purposes, and much later, in the sixteenth century, statistical inventories were published in Germany, Italy and France. Although initially the statistics arises from the elaboration of censuses, its application is currently extended to numerous fields, such as agriculture, biology, politics, psychology, education and so on. However, there are many people who for lack of critical sense of a statistical nature are very easily impressed by surpris...
Publicar un comentario
Leer más