
The Gall–Peters projection is a map projection, which unlike the one most of us see commonly, shows the equal-area of countries. At first, the map looks strange but the reason for this is that the one we see everyday, the Mercator projection, increases the sizes of countries and continents the further they are from the equator.

The size of Africa has been so vigorously changed that Africa can actually fit the United States of America, China, India, Japan and most of the European countries as seen in the The True Size of Africa map by Kai Krause. Kai Krause said that many American school children said that the United States was the biggest country in the world and had a population of 1-2 billion adding that ‘even with Asian and European college students, geographical estimates were often off by factors of 2-3. ‘
There are, of course, many other projections for maps. NASA has developed free G.Projector software for Windows, Linux and Mac which has over 90 map projections, though they also host different types of map projections for viewing without the software.