Of the six-billion-plus people in the world, 600 million live on islands. In other words, one in ten of the world’s population is an island dweller(居民). This is not so hard to imagine when you consider that more than 200 million people live in indonesia alone – and abou~60 million more live on the island of Britain.
No island , or group of islands , is the same. Indonesia, for example, is a nation which consists entirely of islands, nearly 14,000 of them, of which 6,000 are inhabited(有人居住的). Britain is a small, crowded island, with a population density of 243 people per square kilometer, almost twice as much as China. Britain is also the only island in the world which is connected to a continent by a tunnel, the Channel Tunnel between southeast England and northern France.
If you ignore Australia, Which is an island-continent, the largest island in the world is Greenland, an unusual name for a place which is almost forever covered in ice! On the other hand, Iceland, which is Greenland’ s relatively near neighbor to the east, is much greener.
Why is this? Iceland is far enough north, like Greenland, to be entirely covered by ice, but more than one third of iceland is volcanically active. Magma, which is molten volcanic rock below the surface of the ground, heats the ground above it, keeping it green, The story goes that an early settler from Iceland gave Greenland its name in order to encourage more people to live there!
Even the smallest islands have a story to tell, the remotest inhabited island in the world is Tristan da Cunha, which is in the South Atlantic Ocean. Fewer than 250 people live there and they are all related to each ocher, with only seven surnames between them. The island capital has the romantic nane of Edinburgh of the South Seas.