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Comment by marianov | Hacker News Reader

Do USA schools teach that America is one continent divided in north, central and south America? Or is it America=USA ? I'm from South America and we learn it's one continent

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There are multiple, separate issues in the question.

As a matter of actual geological fact, North America and South America are separate continents (they have their own cratonic cores). Geographically they are considered distinct in the USA also. Central America is a cultural or political region refering to the isthmus -- it is not a continent in any sense.

Nationals of the USA are called "Americans" by USA nationals, and by people from other parts of the world, including Japan, Russia, etc (in their own phonologies). Canadians refer to USA nationals as Americans, and do not call themselves Americans.

Europeans frequently object to USA nationals calling themselves Americans, claiming that the word should refer people's of both North America and South America. People from South American nations seem to feel the same. Mexicans seem to me much more likely to refer to a USA national as "Americano" than they are "Estadounidense."

USA nationals will sometimes describe people from North and South American nations as be from "the Americas."

> Europeans frequently object to USA nationals calling themselves Americans

Many Europeans object to calling themselves Europeans.

Ex: From my travels and conversations - the English don't refer to themselves as Europeans. I asked them what continent they lived on. Doesn't matter.

In my experience, a lot of people from the United States tend to conflate "America" and the "United States of America". It's a pet peeve of mine, so I sometimes correct them. But usually people just get annoyed with me. ;-)

People from the USA often use "the Americas" in place of the sense of "America" that refers to both North America and South America.

This blows my mind, because it never occurred to me that this would actually be taught differently. But yes, afaik, in NA we're taught that North and South America are two separate continents. In Canada however, Americans are from the USA, but we don't generally refer to the USA as America. Only they do that. We refer to the middle nation in NA as The U.S.

It's hard to recall what I was taught about Central America, but I believe it was that it's sort of a region shared between both and only a colloquially separate entity.

So you learned "there are six continents"? That's really interesting. Growing up in the US, we always learned it as seven. I never really thought about that as something that was taught differently based on location.

(Unfortunately though, I think that ignorance is fairly common for a lot of aspects of life for people raised in the US.)

Side note: I was going to say "aspects of life for Americans", but realized Americans means more than just those in the US. So I propose a new term for "people from the US". USers. :)

At least from my experience, America is the US. If you want to refer to the giant landmass that makes up the majority of the land in the western hemisphere, you say "The Americas".

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