Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0514: Anti-trivia: Countries by arable land

Episode Date: February 25, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the countries of world in order of arable land. (Russia is NOT the biggest country by this essential metric!) What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 514. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today is another anti-trivia episode day, where basically I'm talking about not so much how to memorize, but what to memorize. When you encounter a little piece of trivia, is that something to memorize or should you encounter a little piece of trivia, is that something to memorize,

or should you zoom out and look at the more important facts and kind of contextualize that and then focus on what is truly important? So today's trivia fact is actually one we've presented earlier in episode 510, and that is that Russia is the largest country by land mass. But the reality is that even if Russia has more land mass than any other country, is that really practical? The fact is that a good amount of Russia's land isn't really

arable. You can't really convert that into living land or, you know, crops or anything that people can live on. So suppose instead of sorting countries by land mass, we actually prioritize them by how much of that land can be, you know, turned into actual goods or turned into produce. So sorting the countries of the world by arable land really surprised me. And I'm sure that most of you will be very surprised by the list here. So going by how big the countries are and how much of that land is arable, here's our list of the top 15. The number one, believe it or not, is the United States with 1.6 million kilometers squared of arable land. Next, and this one I found equally surprising, is India with 1.5 million kilometers squared of arable land. The next two aren't so surprising. We have China with 1.4 million kilometers squared of arable land, then Russia with 1.2 million, Brazil is very far down after that with 0.6 million. And then we have Australia with

0.5 million. Canada with 0.4 million. And Canada is much larger actually than, it's bigger even than the United States, but only 0.4 million are arable land. Then, surprisingly, the Ukraine with 0.3 million. At least that was a surprise to me. Nigeria with 0.3 million. Argentina with 0.3 million. Mexico with 0.25 million. Turkey, at number 13, with 0.2 million. And then perhaps most obscure of all, we have Kazakhstan, with 0.2 million. So if you reasonably want to prioritize your countries by landmass, these are the top 15. In our next anti-trivia episode,

we'll be going over the best-selling songs of all time. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.