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sc94597 on 15 October 2015
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Luke888 said:
sc94597 said:
Rogerioandrade said:

- the insistence in treating regional continental divisions as separate continents (North/South/Central America). Thankfully, not all Americans agree with that and many don´t care. But those who care have a tendency to be very, very vocal about it, to the point of hating those who don´t agree. It seems that they don´t like to think that they live in the same continent as Venezuela or Brazil.

Generally this is the logic behind it. Eurasia has a better claim to being a single continent than America. 


Following that logic Indians live in the Australian continent, there's a Nazca continent that counts what, 10M people in the best case (?)

It is more complicated than the map suggests. There are many different definitions geologists use for "continents." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Geology

"Plate tectonics offers yet another way of defining continents. Today, Europe and most of Asia constitute the unified Eurasian Plate, which is approximately coincident with the geographic Eurasian continent excluding India, Arabia, and far eastern Russia. India contains a central shield, and the geologically recent Himalaya mobile belt forms its northern margin. North America and South America are separate continents, the connecting isthmus being largely the result of volcanism from relatively recent subduction tectonics. North American continental rocks extend to Greenland (a portion of the Canadian Shield), and in terms of plate boundaries, the North American plate includes the easternmost portion of the Asian land mass. Geologists do not use these facts to suggest that eastern Asia is part of the North American continent, even though the plate boundary extends there; the word continent is usually used in its geographic sense and additional definitions ("continental rocks," "plate boundaries") are used as appropriate."

Still the point is that no matter how you look at it, whether you classify continents as large areas with geographical barriers, or use plates the Americas have more grounds to be separate continents than Europe and Asia. So if one considers the Americas to be a single continent then so should they Eurasia.

In some countries this is the case as well.

http://www.universetoday.com/45468/how-many-continents-are-there/

"Well, in Russia, Eastern Europe and Japan, the people there consider the continents of Europe and Asia as one, known as Eurasia. In other places in the world, North and South America are combined as one American continent while separating Europe and Asia instead. Thus, according to these two views, there should only be 6 continents.

There are even geographical views that prefer the presence of both a Eurasian as well as one American continent. These geographers therefore contend that there should only be 5 continents. "

"

These people argue that, since Europe and Asia are actually part of one great land mass and that Asia and Africa are actually joined by an isthmus (Isthmus of Suez), as are the two Americas (being joined by the Isthmus of Panama), then there should be an Afro-Eurasian continent in addition to one American continent, Antarctica, and Australia."

"But how many continents are there according to the more widely accepted view? In the most widely accepted view, there are 7 continents all in all: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Antarctica, and Australia."

Nothing is right or wrong here, fortunately. It is all based on how one defines a "continent" and how strict said definition is.