As a graduate student in chemistry, my son studied in France for two years. When I initially checked him in, there was a few snooty French students giving him a hard time about Americans. My son casually mentioned that the USA had an area of 3,800,000 Sq miles and the area of France is 248,573 Sq miles. To add insult to injury, my son mentioned that you can put the whole country of France inside the state of Texas and have 20,000 Sq miles left over. All this was said in perfect, native-speaking French and repeated in German and Arabic. He had no other problems after that.