More than geography, these maps offer a picto-statistical image of poignant facts about humanity. I ran into them on the website TwistedSifter.com under the title:  40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World.

Here are my eight favorite:

You know that stuff we hear about American exceptionalism? Well, we certainly are an exception in a world that uses the metric system. Just the U.S and two others do not:

This next divider between nations is a little more even, though I think us righties win the day in the popularity contest of which side of the road to drive on:

English is the most common spoken language in the world in large part due to Britain’s empirical, colonial, and military activities over the years. Here’s a map of every country Britain has invaded:

Meanwhile, here’s every country and some related stats regarding every country McDonald’s has “invaded”:

All this English language influence. Yet there remains a nice variety of writing systems out there:

Many Americans’ last names have been passed down from Europe including, of course, these most-common surnames for each European country:

 

Let’s get geological. Here’s a mapping of every reported earthquake around the Pacific and most of the world since 1898:

And here in America we see that the Mississippi river is a lot more than one river and few tributaries. It’s a whole shelf of the continental U.S. as seen by this map of all the rivers which flow into it:

 

Bonus body map:

 

Again, to check out the other 31 maps, check out 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World. And until next time, here’s to getting to know our world better.

-Brandon