How big is Australia?

    

In some of my recent conversations with Aussie friends we try and compare the size of Australia to the US. Surprisingly, I didn't really have a concept of how the size and populations compared. So I did some research. Some basic facts:

Size:
Wikipedia tells me that the landmass of the States is 3,794,101 square miles whereas Australia is 2,941,300 sq miles (basically add Texas 4 times to Australia and they are the same).

Population:
The US has approximately 314 million people, Australia has a mere 23 million.
The population density of the US is estimated to be about 87.4 people/sq mile; Australia's population density is about 7.3 people /sq mile.

Wikipedia lists the most populated city in the US to be NYC with 19,015,900 people. The most populated city in Australia is Sydney with 4,605,992 people. Melbourne has 4,169,103 people which is quite a bit compared to Jacksonville (approximately 1,345,596) and Athens (192,541, most of which are students).

**bottom line here, the US is only about 1.3 times the size of Australia but has 14 times the people!**

Location:
The States are in the Northern hemisphere, Australia is in the Southern hemisphere. A difficult concept to wrap my brain around:  the south of the US is the warmest whereas the north of Australia is the warmest. Florida is about 1,800 miles from the Equator and Darwin (one of the northern-most cities in Australia is only about 850 miles away). Interestingly, Melbourne is only about 2700 miles away from Antarctica, roughly the distance from Florida to California!

States: 
Whereas the US has 50 states, Australia has only 6 states and two territories (I am in Victoria, others include South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, and Western Australia). Can anybody tell me how many territories the US has?

And there you have it! There will be a quiz later....