Explainers.

195 is the usual answer, but 193, 197 and 251 are all defensible depending on who is counting and what they are counting.

54, unless you are the African Union, in which case it is 55. The gap is one territory and a long argument.

It has a government, a currency, an army and a passport, and it is not a UN member. Both of those sentences are true at once.

27 member states, and three overlapping clubs that people mix up: the EU, the eurozone and the Schengen Area.

A waterway narrow enough to see across carries a share of world trade far larger than its width suggests.

It lifts ships 26 metres over a continent, and a dry year in a Panamanian lake becomes a shipping crisis on two oceans.

Because the Mercator projection trades true size for true angles, and Greenland sits where that trade costs the most.

Two rivers, several claimed sources, eleven countries, and a dam that has changed the politics of all of them.

Australia mines the most, the salt flats of South America hold the largest reserves, and China does most of the refining.

Between 44 and 51, and the disagreement is about where a continent stops rather than about who is a country.

48 by the count this site uses, and five of them sit in Europe as well, depending on who is drawing the line.

Twelve, the smallest count of any inhabited continent, and one of the twelve is still an overseas department of France.

An island the size of Belgium makes most of the advanced chips on earth, and that fact shapes everything else about it.

Grain, gas pipelines, a coastline and a border: four separate reasons, and they explain different parts of the story.

Holland is two provinces out of twelve. The country stopped using it as an official nickname in 2020.

One name was a sales pitch and the other was a warning, and both worked exactly as intended.

Because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree, so the country built a compromise in a sheep paddock between them.

Pretoria governs, Cape Town legislates and Bloemfontein judges, and the split is the price of a union.

A trickle in the Peruvian Andes, a mouth wide enough to hold an island the size of Switzerland.

They began as a way to tell ships apart at sea, and they are still doing that job in a dozen quieter forms.

The phrase described European ignorance, not Africa, and it was used to justify a great deal.

Two West African countries grow most of the world's cocoa, and almost none of the chocolate is made there.

Ethiopia gave the world the plant, Brazil grows the most of it, and the gap between those two is the whole story.

Around thirty countries touch it before you do, and the assembly line is the least interesting part.

Twenty three, once the Caribbean and Central America are counted in, which is the part most published answers quietly skip.

Fifteen republics in four years. The map came apart along borders that had been drawn decades earlier and never meant to be real.

Not Toronto and not Montreal. A lumber town on a river won the argument, and Queen Victoria settled it.

Bern runs the country, and Swiss law calls it the federal city rather than the capital. The constitution left the word out.

A line two officers drew in about thirty minutes in 1945, and a war that ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.