Yeah, definitely fair.

That’s a good point about excluding Alaska in the area calculation; Alaska is almost 18% of the land area of the US, so pulling it is significant.

From the perspective of population, I honestly don’t know why I didn’t consider that when thinking through this originally. It seems so obvious in hindsight, lol.

GDP is a little bit more complicated. By pure GDP, it looks like Brazil and Canada kind of flip back and forth depending on the year (right now Brazil is just barely above Canada); though if you look at per-capita GDP, Canada is way higher up the list.

Not even close. South Africa is like an eighth the size of Brazil. Australia is significantly bigger than South Africa, too, though slightly smaller than Brazil; and Angola, Peru, a good chunk of Congo, and Argentina are all (a) South of the Equator, (b) bigger than South Africa, and © smaller than Australia.

Oh! Oh. Ha.

In hindsight it’s so obvious. Thanks.

each colocated with halves of two others.

No.

Ok. I can’t figure out what you mean by “second biggest.” At first I assumed you meant “America” as the continent, rather than “South America,” since Brazil is the biggest country in the latter by quite a wide margin (it’s about four times the size of Argentina). But Brazil is the third largest Pan-American country after Canada and the US. So, ok, you must have a different definition in mind. Second-largest in the Southern hemisphere, maybe? But Brazil is bigger than Australia, by a million square kilometers.

Second-largest…uh…country with a large part of its mainland in UTC-3? (After Canada.) Second-largest country from which you can draw a direct line to Antarctica? (That one might be debatable, actually.) Second-largest country whose Northern border is closer to Canada than it is to its Southern border? (After the US, and yes, that’s true.)

I need answers!

There are four hemispheres; each colocated with halves of two others. There’s a Northern and Southern hemisphere, yes, but there’s also an Eastern and Western hemisphere; one from the Prime Meridian East to the Date Line, and the other from the Prime Meridian West to the Date Line.

And actually, geographers talk about a third hemisphere delineation: the “Land Hemisphere” and the “Water Hemisphere.” The “equator” of this hemispherical division is a circle that runs south from Baja California to just under Peru, curves across South America and across the Atlantic where it ducks under South Africa, then curves back North to skirt just below Vietnam and Japan before turning South again over the North Pacific. That might not sound like a hemisphere, but it is when you look at a globe; and the “Land Hemisphere,” which is centered on France, contains 81% of Earth’s land, while the “Water Hemisphere,” which is centered just south of New Zealand, contains about 63% of Earth’s water.