New Zealand is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses and around 600 smaller islands. The majority of New Zealand’s population of 5 million is of European descent. The indigenous Māori are the largest minority, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders. The nation’s capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland.
About New Zealand in brief
New Zealand is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island and the South Island —and around 600 smaller islands, covering a total area of 268,021 square kilometres. The country’s varied topography and sharp mountain peaks owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. The majority of New Zealand’s population of 5 million is of European descent; the indigenous Māori are the largest minority, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders. New Zealand underwent major economic changes during the 1980s, which transformed it from a protectionist to a liberalised free-trade economy. The official languages are English, Māorei, and New Zealand Sign Language, with English being very dominant. The nation’s capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. It is about 2,000 kilometres east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and 1,000km south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The island nation is a member of the United Nations, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, ASEAN Plus Six, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Pacific Community and the Pacific Islands Forum. It also includes Tokelau ; the Cook Islands and Niue ; and the Ross Dependency, which is New Zealand’s territorial claim in Antarctica. The New Zealand Board of Geographic Discovery discovered in 2009 that the names of North and South Island had never been formalised, and alternative names were used.
This set the names as Ika-a-Māui, Te Waipounamu or Te Waka o Aoraki for the main islands. For each island, either English or Māorori, either Te Waipsi (North Island or South Island) or TeWaipounu (South Island) is the name given to the largest island or the smaller one. The name North Island is used for the North Island, while South Island is known as Te Waippu (The South Island or The Middle Island) for the smaller South Island. In 1841, New Zealand became a colony within the British Empire, and in 1907 it became a dominion; it gained full statutory independence in 1947. Queen Elizabeth II is the country’s monarch and is represented by a governor-general, currently Dame Patsy Reddy. Aotearoa (Māori) in English; often translated as “land of the long white cloud” is the current Mori name for New Zealand. The first European visitor to New Zealand, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, named the islands Staten Land, believing they were part of the Staten Landt that Jacob Le Maire had sighted off the southern end of South America. In 1642, the Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman became the first European to sight New Zealand and named them Nova Zeelandia, from Latin, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. This name was later anglicised to \”New Zealand\”.
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This page is based on the article New Zealand published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 13, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
