A continent is one of Earth's largest masses of land, separated from other continents by oceans. The world has seven continents: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Each continent contains many different countries, climates, and landscapes.

Asia is the largest continent, home to more than half the world's people and stretching from frozen Siberia to tropical Indonesia. Africa is where humans first evolved millions of years ago. Antarctica, covered in ice, has no permanent human residents. Australia is both a continent and a country. Europe and Asia are actually connected as one giant landmass, but they're counted as separate continents because of their distinct histories and cultures.

The word continental means relating to a continent, like when someone talks about continental drift, the slow movement of continents across Earth's surface over millions of years. Scientists now know that the continents were once joined together in a supercontinent called Pangaea, which began breaking apart about 200 million years ago. The continents are still moving today, just too slowly for us to notice: about as fast as your fingernails grow.