Mind Blowing Facts

When I say the word 'America', what does that mean to you? If, like me, your native language is English this might seem like an obvious question. America is right here, the country. However, some people would strongly disagree with this: particularly those from South America. To South Americans, America is not a country but a continent. This is America, right here. While English speakers would say those are 2 continents - North America and South America (collectively 'The Americas'), Spanish and Portuguese speakers refer to it as one continent: America. Of course it's not just South Americans who view the continents this way. France also agrees on the six-continent view of world. This can be seen by the 5 rings of the Olympics, which represents the 5 inhabited continents of the world (ie - not Antarctica). Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and America. And recently I've been seen a lot of arguing over this very issue in the comments section. For starters, how abo...

Like most geo-political changes in the world, the division of Korea was the result of war. The Korean War took place from 1950 to 1953. But it wasn't really the Korean War that split the country. The Korean War just made the split more permanent, but it was already split. We need to look not only at the Korean War, but look at the bigger picture. The split had more to do with the Cold War. The Cold War was interesting in that it wasn't so much a war in the traditional sense. The Cold War was effectively a war of wars. The Cold War was primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in a more broad sense it was effectively an ideological war between capitalism and communism. The US and the USSR never actually fought each other directly in battle, but instead fought indirectly through proxy wars. One example would be the Vietnam War, the United States (who were helping South Vietnam) were at war with communist North Vietnam, while the Soviets provided them with tan...

Now, this may seem like a rather silly question, but I think it may be one of those questions people might be a bit too embarrassed to ask, but there's shortage of people wondering. The short answer can be summed up in just one word... inflation. Inflation is defined as a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency. But I'll get to that... first though, we need to establish exactly what money... is. Now this may seem obvious, but something that's important to know, is that money, has absolutely no... intrinsic value. What that means is that money in itself has no actual value, it's only considered valuable because it can buy things, but if you were stranded on a desert island, money would be totally useless. Money only has value because we believe it has value. This is called the Tinkerbell Effect, something I learned about from Vsauce. The Tinkerbell Effect is ...

The international border between two countries defines where one country ends and another begins. This is something that should be incredibly simple, but often isn't. International borders come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some are simply an imaginary line in the middle of a street, while others are... much more clearly defined... and some are even guarded 24/7. But before we begin, I need to quickly define a couple of terms. Enclave and exclave. An enclave is a country, or part of a country, that is entirely surrounded by another country, while an exclave is part of a country that is geographically seperated from rest of the country. In this example, Country A is an enclave of Country B because it's totally surrounded by it. In this next example, Y is an exclave of Country A. Exclaves aren't necessarily always enclaves too, either because they have more than one border, or they have a coastline... or both. In this final example. X is both an enclave and an exclave. I...

Before the world had time zones, every town and city used their own local time, which was based on the sun. I.e - the sun was at its highest point at 12 noon. This is known as solar time. And this worked fine when the best means of transportation was... somewhat limited... but the advancement of technology made this problematic. The United Kingdom was the first country to adopt a standard time zone, by using the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, which was known as Greenwich Mean Time. The United States soon followed, by adopting 4 different time zones. The US also based their time zones from the Royal Observatory, and were 5, 6, 7, and 8 hours behind. Then, in 1884, an international conference between 26 nations decided that the Royal Observatory in Greenwich would be used as the Prime Meridian of the world, marking zero degrees longitude. So because there's 24 hours in a day, 24 lines of longitude, every 15 degrees, mark the centre of each time zon...

On the west coast of Africa there's a place called Western Sahara. You may recognise it from data maps, in which it's almost always gray - no data available. This is because Western Sahara a disputed territory. With a population of around 500,000 yet a land area greater than that of the United Kingdom, Western Sahara is one of the most sparely populated parts of the world. Most of Western Sahara is hot, dry, uninhabitable desert. But despite this, Western Sahara is claimed by two different parties. On the one hand, Western Sahara is claimed by Morocco, as an integral part of its country - the Southern Provinces. On the other hand, Western Sahara is claimed by the Polisario Front, a rebel national liberation movement fighting for the independence of Western Sahara, as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. About 80% of the region is controlled and administered by Morocco, including all of the coastline and natural resources. Moroccan built walls through Western Sahara split th...

In English, it generally refers to the country: the United States of America. But in other languages (Spanish, for example), it refers to the continent. However, in English, these are 2 separate continents, part of the 7-continent model: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Antarctica, and the topic of this video: Australia. So... is Australia a country or a continent? Well, Australia is one of the 193 member of the United Nations. Although, just because a country is a member of the UN, doesn't necessarily mean that all other members agree that that country... is a country. For example, North and South Korea don't recognise each other, both believing themselves to be the legitimate government of all of Korea. Turkey doesn't recognise Cyprus because of the situation with Northern Cyprus. Even the most populated country in the world, the People's Republic of China, isn't recognised by 22 UN members, who recgonise the Republic of China is the legitimate...