Brazil vs Malaysia

Brazil is 26 times larger than Malaysia — 8,515,770 against 329,847 km². Brazil is 5.9 times more populous than Malaysia — 212,812,405 against 35,977,838 people.

Side by side

Population density

Malaysia is 4.4 times more densely populated than Brazil — 109 against 25 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 — Brazil on the right, Malaysia on the left.
• Different currencies: the Brazilian real and the Malaysian ringgit.
• Brazil spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — South America and Asia.

Brazil

The fifth-largest country in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It holds about sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest, and the Amazon River discharges roughly a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world's oceans — more than the next seven rivers combined. Brazil borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.

Malaysia

Split between the Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo, separated by about 640 km of the South China Sea. Mount Kinabalu on Borneo is 4,095 m and still rising a few millimetres a year. The rainforest here is estimated at 130 million years old, among the oldest on Earth.

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.