Why does Russia look bigger than Africa on a map?

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 above to get the exact sizes of countries compared to what we are used to on a map.

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