Australia vs Ethiopia

Australia is 7.0 times larger than Ethiopia — 7,741,220 against 1,104,300 km². Ethiopia is 4.9 times more populous than Australia — 135,472,051 against 27,614,411 people.

Side by side

Population density

Ethiopia is 34 times more densely populated than Australia — 123 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Ethiopia on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Ethiopian birr.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Africa.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia has the highest mean elevation of any country in Africa, with more land above 3,000 m than the rest of the continent combined. The Blue Nile leaves Lake Tana here and supplies most of the Nile's flow during the flood season. The country keeps its own calendar of thirteen months, running seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.