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4 results for “countries”.

• Landlocked Countries — The High Price of Living Without a Coast
  Forty-plus nations conduct all their trade through somebody else's ports, roads and customs. It is one of geography's steepest handicaps — measurable in GDP, freight bills and diplomacy — and the reasons Bolivia still wants a sea outlet explain why maps matter more than treaties.
• How Countries Count Their People — Census, Sampling and the Numbers Behind the Numbers
  Every ranking you have ever argued about online — population, GDP, literacy — ultimately traces back to someone knocking on a door, or deciding not to. The census is one of humanity's oldest technologies of government, and one of the few whose errors are inherited by every statistic built on top.
• How Countries Are Defined — What Actually Makes a Country a Country
  There is no single number of countries on Earth, and that is not laziness — it is the deepest political question in geography. Here is how international law, recognition and practice decide what counts as a country, from Nauru to Somaliland.
• Geography Records: the Longest, Largest, Highest and Driest on Earth — Explained
  The Nile or the Amazon? Is Antarctica a desert? Why is Australia an island-continent and Greenland just an island? The record book of planet Earth, with the measurement fights inside it.