not appropriate to fit exactly 55 million people into each cell. Oceania, for example, was kept separate from Indonesia and therefore has fewer than 30 million

The imbalance in population size among the countries of the world is illustrated by the fact that the six largest countries in population, China, India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil and the Russian Federation together have more than half of the total. The smallest in the UN list have only a few hundred inhabitants (e.g. the Holy See in Italy has 890, the Cocos Islands and Pitcairn in the Pacific Ocean have 555 and 51 respectively). A comparable disparity is found in the territorial size of countries, with the largest six having about half of the land area of the world: the Russian Federation, Canada, China, the USA, Brazil and Australia. With an area of almost 17.1 million sq km (6.56 million sq miles), Russia is 17,000 times as large in area as Hong Kong, although the latter manages to contain on its 1,000 sq km (386 sq miles) 5.4 million people, compared with Russia’s population of 147 million.