Russia is big
December 22, 2014 Leave a comment
I’ve seen this in several places today, “Amazing fact. Tiny Bangladesh has more people than Russia”:
The projection used in maps can distort thing (the land area of England and Bangladesh is just about equal for example) but Bangladesh is genuinely 100x smaller than Russia whilst having pretty much the same population (they’re the 8th and 9th most populated, respectively).
Though I’m not sure it’s that much of an amazing fact. Out of 200 countries to pick from we’re comparing the world’s largest country with the world’s densest (leaving aside Singapore and a few others with <5m inhabitants). What did you expect?
Bangladesh is in a heavily populated portion of the world
I also read recently, but can’t find back the exact numbers, something like it was only in 1974 that the African continent reached the population density that Europe had in the middle ages. And you can fit a lot of countries into Africa
Marc Gawley 