Reading and writing fill in the blanks

What is a country, and how a country defined? When people ask how many countries there are in the world, they expect a simple answer. After allHoweverMoreoverFurthermore After all , we've savedexploredtravelledinvented explored the whole planet, we have international travel, satellite navigation and plenty of global organizations like the United Nations, so we should really know how many countries there are! However, the answer to the question vacatesvaryingvariesvirial varies according to whom you ask. Most people say there are 192 countries, but others point out that there could be more like 260 of them.

So why isn't there a straight forward answer? The problem raisesrisesbeganarises arises because there isn't a universally agreed definition of 'country' and because, for political reasons, some countries finddeemmakeconceive find it convenient to recognize or not recognize other countries.

For example, Taiwan claims to be a country, but China states that Taiwan is just another part of China. The consequence is that the USA, that doesn't want to upset China, doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country. Conversely, from the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union annexed the countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but the USA continued to regard them as independent countries that were 'occupied' because it didn't really get on with the USSR.

So, how do governments define what makes a country?