Which country is much larger than the average person thinks it is?

 

• Brazil, of which many people seem unaware that the contiguous territory of the United States is actually larger and could extend from the northern parts of Canada to Mexico if it were located in North America. In Eurasia, it could extend from Northern Russia to Saudi Arabia (north-south) and from Hungary to Kyrgyzstan.

• India, which looks large, but is not large on the usual maps we see due to its location at lower latitudes just below enormous and higher-latitude (therefore wrongly favored by the Mercator projection) countries like China and Russia.

• Saudi Arabia, which could encompass most of Central Europe, a large part of Eastern Europe, and most of the Italian peninsula.

• Indonesia, which looks like a bunch of relatively small islands in a large but not very impressive archipelago when viewed on the most commonly used Mercator projection, actually has very large islands (by average island standards, of course) and stretches over an enormous length that would roughly go from Ireland to Uzbekistan.