The Geografile

In New Zealand, North Island’s Ninety-Mile Beach is only 55 miles long, while Victory, Australia’s, Ninety-Mile Beach is 94 miles long.

In Norway, hydropower meets more than 95% of the country’s electricity demand.

India is the world’s largest producer of mangoes, its national fruit.

Monaco is so small that it could fit inside New York's Central Park.

In China, more than 92 million people share the family name Li, but those with the family name Wang number 92.8 million, or about 6.6% of the population.

Lake Nicaragua contains about 400 islands, some of which are active volcanoes. Since the lake was severed from the Pacific Ocean by a belt of volcanic cones, unique freshwater species of swordfish have evolved.

Sahara is from the Arabic word sahra, meaning “desert.” So saying Sahara Desert is redundant.

Azerbaijan was the first Muslim country to extend suffrage to women, in 1918.

Brazil is the only country that crosses both the equator and a tropic (Tropic of Capricorn). Uruguay is the only South American country completely outside the tropic latitudes.

New Zealand was named by the Dutch after Zeeland, a region in the Netherlands.

Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire from AD 330 until 1453, when it was captured by the Turks, made the capital of the Ottoman Empire and renamed Istanbul.

Borneo is the world’s only island divided between three countries: Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Hungary’s capital, Budapest, until 1873 was two separate cities, Buda and Pest, that lay on opposite banks of the Danube River.

Chile was named by natives who once lived on its long and narrow strip of coast. Chile means “end of the land.”

Denmark, with about 131 Danes per square mile, is Scandinavia’s most densely populated country, but if you include its territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, it is the world’s most sparsely populated country, with an average of 0.15 people per square mile. Otherwise, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated, with four people per square mile.

The site of Canberra was chosen as the place to build a new Australian capital in 1908, to replace Melbourne, but that was delayed by World War I and it didn’t become the official national government seat until 1927.

Though it has long been stated that the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon, this myth was debunked in 1969 by American astronaut Alan Bean, who reported that when his spacecraft was only a few thousand miles from Earth (the moon is about 230,000 miles distant), no trace of human building was visible. The Great Wall is not even visible from the International Space Station, orbiting 205 to 270 miles out, though the pyramids at Giza can be discerned.

Brazil borders on 10 other countries. On the South American continent, only Chile and Ecuador don’t share a border with Brazil.

Fraser Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site off the coast of Queensland, Australia, is the world’s largest sand island, at 74 miles long and 18 miles wide. It’s the only known place on Earth where rainforests thrive on top of sand dunes.

Namibia was originally a German colony and called, from 1884 to 1915, South-West Africa. From 1915 until independence in 1990, it was governed by South Africa.