Apparently most of us have been living with the wrong idea of the actual sizes of the continents, as we know our planet from the standard maps of earth which are badly wrong, due to Mercator Projection – a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 – the common way to draw land, stuck to a sphere, as a 2-dimensional map. In reality the United States are no bigger that the Sahara desert.
In this video the actual size of countries is explained. Amazing.