The largest island in the world is Greenland. Australia is considered a continent because it has unique plant and animal life. Antarctica is also a continent – larger than Europe and Australia. Greenland, although quite big, shares the habitat features of Northern America.

The smallest island in the world – according to The Guinness Book of Records – is Bishop Rock. It lays at the most south-westerly part of the United Kingdom. It is one of the 1,040 islands around Britain and has only a lighthouse on it.

In 1861, the British government set out the parameters for classifying an island. It was decided that if it was inhabited, the size was immaterial. However, if it was uninhabited, it had to be “the summer’s pasturage of at least one sheep” – which is about two acres.

Going by the above parameters, most of the 179,584 “islands” around Finland and the almost 200,000 around Canada would not match Indonesia as the country with the most islands. In fact, Indonesia consists only of islands – 13,667 of them, of which 6,000 are inhabited.

The remotest uninhabited island is Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic. The remotest inhabited island in the world is Tristan da Cunha. It is in the South Atlantic, 2,575 km south of St Helena, which is an island a few hundred kilometres off the coast of South Africa. Tristan da Cunha has no TV but does have one radio station. The population totals 242 and they only have seven surnames between them, so they are all related. Tristan da Cunha does have a capital, called Edinburgh of the South Seas.

The smallest independent island country is the Pacific island of Nauru. Only the Vatican City and Monaco are smaller countries.

Of the 6 billion+ people in the world, one out of 10 lives on an island (600 million). This is not so hard to believe when you consider that more than 200 million people live in Indonesia alone and some 60 million live in Britain, the only island connected to a continent (through the Channel Tunnel).

http://www.didyouknow.cd/islands.htm