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convention used by virtually all numerical software applications,
namely, any digit followed by a "5" is rounded up to the next higher
digit, no matter whether the original digit is even or odd. Thus,
for example, when rounded to the nearest integer, 2.5 becomes 3,
rather than 2, as occurred in some pre-computer rounding systems.

Why do you list "Independence" dates for countries like France,
Germany, and the United Kingdom?

For most countries, this entry presents the date that sovereignty
was achieved and from which nation, empire, or trusteeship. For
other countries, the date may be some other significant nationhood
event such as the traditional founding date or the date of
unification, federation, confederation, establishment, or state
succession and so may not strictly be an "Independence" date.
Dependent entities have the nature of their dependency status noted
in this same entry.

Technical

Does The World Factbook comply with Section 508 of the
Rehabilitation Act regarding accessibility of Web pages?

The World Factbook home page has a link entitled "Text/Low Bandwidth
Version." The country data in the text version is fully accessible.
We believe The World Factbook is compliant with the Section 508 law
in both fact and spirit. If you are experiencing difficulty, please
use our comment form to provide us details of the specific problem
you are experiencing and the assistive software and/or hardware that
you are using so that we can work with our technical support staff
to find and implement a solution. We welcome visitors' suggestions
to improve accessibility of The World Factbook and the CIA Web site.

I am using the Factbook online and it is not working. What is wrong?

Hundreds of "Factbook" look-alikes exist on the Internet. The
Factbook site at: www.cia.gov is the only official site.

When I attempt to download a PDF (Portable Document Format) map file
(or some other map) the file has no image. Can you fix this?

Some of the files on The World Factbook Web site are large and could
take several minutes to download on a dial-up connection. The screen
might be blank during the download process.

When I open a map on The World Factbook site, it is fuzzy or
granular, or too big or too small. Why?

Adjusting the resolution setting on your monitor should correct this
problem.

Is The World Factbook country data available in machine-readable
format? All I can find is HTML, but I'm looking for s