Australia vs South Korea

Australia is 78 times larger than South Korea — 7,741,220 against 99,720 km². South Korea is 1.9 times more populous than Australia — 51,684,564 against 27,614,411 people.

Side by side

Population density

South Korea is 145 times more densely populated than Australia — 518 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, South Korea on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the South Korean won.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Asia.

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.

South Korea

About seventy percent mountain, so the population is packed into the valleys and coastal plains; the Seoul metropolitan area holds roughly half the country. Jeju Island is a shield volcano whose lava tube system is among the finest in the world. South Korea has the fastest average internet connections of any large country.

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.