Nova Scotia is one of the 10 provinces and three territories of Canada. It lies on the east coast and is almost completely surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Part of Nova Scotia is actually an island, called Cape Breton Island.

Most of the province is covered with forests and lakes. The larger towns are mainly along the seacoast.

The neighbouring Canadian provinces are New Brunswick (which is bigger) and Prince Edward Island (which is smaller). Nova Scotia is about 53,000 square kilometres (25,000 square miles), which makes it about twice the size of the American state of Massachusetts and just a bit smaller than Ireland.

The nearest American state is Maine. It takes about four hours to drive from Nova Scotia through New Brunswick to the Maine border.

Nova Scotia is in the Atlantic standard time zone, so our clocks are one hour ahead of eastern standard time (for example, New York and Toronto), and two hours ahead of central standard time (for example, Chicago and Winnipeg). So, when it is noon in Chicago, it is 1 p.m. in Toronto and 2 p.m. in Halifax.

Like the rest of Canada, Nova Scotia uses the metric system.

The capital city is Halifax, an international seaport and transportation centre.

The name of our province, Nova Scotia, is Latin and it means New Scotland. It was given this name by the Scots, who were the first British settlers to come here.

In January 2002, Nova Scotia was home to 940,000 people.