South America

South America has just twelve UN-member countries — the smallest count of any inhabited continent — making it one of the easiest continents in this book to memorise completely. Two of the twelve, Argentina and Brazil, are G20 members, and Brazil is additionally one of BRICS's five founding members (2001/2006 grouping, formalised as a forum from 2009) — the "B" in the acronym — a fact worth pairing directly with Brazil's entry in the table below rather than treating it as a separate memorisation task.

South America — Capitals and Currencies

Brasília is worth a special mention: Brazil deliberately built it from scratch as a planned capital and moved its seat of government there from Rio de Janeiro in 1960, both to spur development of the country's interior and to move the capital away from the coast — the same underlying logic (interior development, decongesting an old colonial coastal capital) that later drove Nigeria's move to Abuja, Pakistan's move to Islamabad, and Myanmar's move to Naypyidaw. Ecuador and El Salvador (in Central America, covered above) both fully adopted the US dollar as legal tender, abandoning their own national currencies (the sucre and the colón respectively) after severe currency crises — a decision called "dollarisation," distinct from merely pegging a currency to the dollar while keeping it nominally separate (as Panama's balboa or several Gulf currencies do).

Memory hook — "Twelve countries, easy to finish": South America is the shortest capital-currency list of any continent in this book — memorise all twelve in one sitting, and treat it as your fastest possible full-continent revision win.

Practice Recall: Name Brazil's former capital before Brasília, and name the two South American/Central American countries that abandoned their own currency entirely in favour of the US dollar.

South America shares North America's "zero landlocked countries at continental level" quirk only partly — it in fact has two landlocked countries, Bolivia and Paraguay, both worth remembering precisely because the rest of the continent's coastline is so continuous that these two stand out. Bolivia lost its only coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–83) — a fact that still shapes Bolivia-Chile relations today and is a frequently tested static-GK/history crossover point. South America has no true island nations among its twelve sovereign states, though several (Chile, with Easter Island; Ecuador, with the Galápagos) hold well-known island territories as part of their mainland sovereignty.