@calvinhobbesliker:
@SAS:
Those are classified as continents. :-P
Why? Their size? That’s arbitrary. Why is Australia a continent but Greenland not?
So what arbitrary method were you using for classification? :-P There is a handy thing you can do with the internet called Googling something and a nice website called Wikipedia that will help you find out about how they classify a continent versus an island…
“The criterion ‘large’ leads to arbitrary classification: Greenland, with a surface area of 2,166,086 square kilometres (836,330 sq mi) is considered the world’s largest island, while Australia, at 7,617,930 square kilometres (2,941,300 sq mi) is deemed to be a continent.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent
“There is no standard of size which distinguishes islands from islets and continents.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island
So yes, it is rather arbitrary, though that is the convention; and considering that Australia is more than twice as large as Greenland it certainly is at least more of a continent than Greenland. However, Greenland is sometimes also referred to as a “subcontinent” along with India.
Besides, England is a much smaller island and it isn’t an “island” by A&A standards. :-P I wasn’t trying to make a complete declaration of fact or get into an argument, I just thought I’d mention that Greenland is considered the largest island in the world; which is a matter of some kind of debate, just as your example of Eurasia vs. Afro-Eurasia is. :wink: