Why does Russia look bigger than Africa on a map?

The knowledge of the majority of people about the relative sizes of countries is probably based on maps than statistics.

The Mercator projection, the most popular world map, distorts the size of the shape of landmasses near the pole. This results in Russia looking bigger than Africa.  Actually Africa can nearly fit two Russias.  In fact, Africa has an area of 11.73 million square miles while Russian one is only 6.6 million square miles.

One can refer to the image below to get the exact sizes of countries compared to what we are used to on a map.  

This shows that we tend to underestimate the size of countries close to the equator when representing them on a map.

Buy a globe today to see how you have been tricked for so long and correct your perception by figuring out the right size of countries, regions and continents.