The standard world map makes Africa look far smaller than it actually is.

The Mercator projection, still the basis for many widely used world maps, was designed in 1569 for accurate sea navigation, not for representing landmass sizes correctly. Its major flaw is that it inflates the apparent size of regions farther from the equator: Greenland, for instance, appears roughly comparable in size to Africa on a Mercator map, when in reality Africa is about 14 times larger.

Because the Mercator projection became the default for classrooms, atlases, and web maps for so long, this distortion has quietly warped how most people intuitively picture the relative size of continents. Africa is large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined within its actual land area, a fact that surprises most people who grew up looking at Mercator-based maps, where none of that would seem remotely possible.