| definition
| - A federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, DC, the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The State of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to its east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait, and the State of Hawaii is in the mid-Pacific. The United States also possesses several territories, or insular areas, that are scattered around the Caribbean and Pacific. The states are divided into smaller administrative regions, called counties in most states, exceptions being Alaska (parts of the state are organized into subdivisions called boroughs; the rest of the state's territory that is not included in any borough is divided into "census areas"), and Louisiana (which is divided into county-equivalents that are called parishes). There are also independent cities which are within particular states but not part of any particular county or consolidated city-counties. Another type of organization is where the city and county are unified and function as an independent city. There are thirty-nine independent cities in Virginia and other independent cities or city-counties are San Francisco, California, Baltimore, Maryland, St. Louis, Missouri, Denver, Colorado and Carson City, Nevada. Counties can include a number of cities, towns, villages, or hamlets, or sometimes just a part of a city. Counties have varying degrees of political and legal significance, but they are always administrative divisions of the state. Counties in many states are further subdivided into townships, which, by definition, are administrative divisions of a county. In some states, such as Michigan, a township can file a charter with the state government, making itself into a "charter township", which is a type of mixed municipal and township status (giving the township some of the rights of a city without all of the responsibilities), much in the way a metropolitan municipality is a mixed municipality and county.
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