Australia vs Puerto Rico

Australia is 850 times larger than Puerto Rico — 7,741,220 against 9,104 km². Australia is 8.7 times more populous than Puerto Rico — 27,614,411 against 3,184,835 people.

Side by side

Population density

Puerto Rico is 98 times more densely populated than Australia — 350 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, Puerto Rico on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the United States dollar.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and North America.

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.

Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico Trench off the north coast reaches about 8,400 m, the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest in the United States National Forest system. Mosquito Bay on Vieques is the brightest bioluminescent bay in the world, lit by dinoflagellates in the water.

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.