Micronesia names a part of the west Pacific Ocean with more than two thousand small islands. The Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati sit in that neighbourhood. The name comes from Greek for “small islands.” Though actually, the word does two jobs, and school books often glue them together. One job is the whole island region. The other is a country inside that region, the Federated States of Micronesia — four states in the Caroline Islands. A population of about 106,000 (2014) is that country, not every island in the region. The wider region also has its own countries, such as the Marshall Islands, Palau, Kiribati, and Nauru, and places such as Guam. So when someone says Micronesia, they may mean one country or a much bigger scatter of islands. People who study the Pacific often put three names side by side: Polynesia (“many islands”), Melanesia, and Micronesia (“small islands”). You will meet the word in geography, not in everyday talk in Taiwan.