The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

A quick breakdown of the correct answers from Friday's return to our occasional obsession with atlas-factoids. No clear winner in all categories emerged, but the only undisputed claim to correctitude is held by Bootsy, Marquise d'Yogurt, with her answer to No. 3. We bestow upon her the laurels. Here follows some further illumination on the answers.

1.Out of 194 nations listed in the UN Demographic Yearbook, which four share the distinction being at the median in terms of total land area? Here's a hint: one is in Asia, one in the Americas, and two are in Africa.

Bootsy was the only one to turn in a correct answer, with North Korea (120,538 km²). The others are Nicaragua (130,000 km²), Malawi (118,484 km²), and Eritrea (117,600 km²). Some of the guesses following the ID of North Korea were Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Congo and Morocco (all about three times the size of these countries). Libya is way up there, the 16th largest country by area. Greece however, was a very close guess, being just a thousand square kilmoters bigger than Nicaragua. Japan, by the way. Costa Rica, another guess, is relatively tiny, just over 51,000 km².

2.Slicing that same list another way, what's country has a geographical area that most closely approaches the average?

At 676,578 km², the most average country turns out to be the one under the thumb of Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council Than Shwe, military ruler of Myanmar (or Burma, if you prefer to abstain from the regime's choice of name). In ordinal terms, Myanmar/Burma is No. 39 on the list, coming appropriately between Z-for-Zambia and A-for-Afghanistan.

3. What non-island nation (besides the ministates of Monaco and Singapore) has the highest ratio of coastline/total area?

Norway's super-fjorism and top-level position along the Scandinavian peninsula give it coast-area-ratio bragging rights, beating out No. 2 Denmark and No. 3 Greece. If we had been comparing Coast-Perimeter percentages (i.e., how much of a nation's perimeter is coastline, with island nations getting 100%), Denmark sqeezes into the lead. But that's because it has a bunch of islands, which in my book is cheating.

(The source for this is the U.N. Demographic yearbook, as helpfully interpreted in this Wikipedia entry.)