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Moment of Um

Why do different countries have different flags?

Moment of Um

American Public Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.41.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are 195 different countries in the world, and they all have different flags. Why is that? And where did flags come from? We asked flag expert Michael Green to unfurl the answers.



Do you have a vexing question of your own? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact and we’ll help you flag down the answer.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. Moment ofum comes um, um,

0:26.0

Moment of Um, comes to you from APM studios. I'm purple.

0:27.0

Um.

0:28.0

Hello there.

0:32.0

So nice to meet you. I'm the color purple. No, not the award-winning movie from 1985. The actual color. Surely you've met my friends blue and red. We're really close. I don't

0:46.6

know our personalities just blend really well together. We share a ton of hobbies

0:52.4

like coming together to create the most beautiful sunsets

0:56.1

making up new slurpy flavors or organizing our bookshelves by color.

1:01.0

My favorite book is Harold in the Purple Cram, naturally.

1:05.0

Lately, though, blue and red have been spending a lot of time on a new hobby,

1:09.4

learning about different countries and their flags. Did you know there are 195 countries in the world and they all have different flags?

1:20.0

Most country flags have either red or blue in them.

1:23.2

And that's cool, I guess.

1:26.2

But there are only two countries whose flags have purple in them,

1:30.5

Nicaragua and Dominica, which which to be honest, makes me feel a little left out.

1:37.2

Like what's wrong with purple?

1:39.4

I mean, the purple parrot on the flag of Dominica is pretty cool, but what about all the other national flags?

1:47.0

Why do different countries even have different flags anyway?

1:51.0

Turns out, one of our listeners had the same question,

1:54.0

so we found someone who could answer it.

2:00.0

So,

2:02.0

flags really are a way for us to talk to each other. You know, we can use our

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