Short answers, pulled from the story.
Asia covers more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of its total surface area. Its 4.7 billion people make up roughly 60% of the world's population, making it the largest continent by both land area and population.
The name Asia is believed to originate in the Bronze Age toponym Assuwa, which originally referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. The Romans later used Asia for a province in western Anatolia, and Pliny was one of the first writers to apply the name to the whole continent.
The Asia-Europe border is a historical and cultural construct with no clear physical separation. A commonly accepted division places Asia to the east of the Turkish straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black seas. The Ural River boundary prevailed in the mid-19th century.
China and India traded places as the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 CE, with China holding the highest GDP per capita until 1500. Economic historian Angus Maddison records that India had the world's largest economy for much of the past three millennia before the 19th century, accounting for 25% of the world's industrial output.
Asia was the birthplace of most of the world's mainstream religions, including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Hinduism is the largest religion in Asia with around 1.1 billion adherents, while Islam originated in the Hejaz in modern-day Saudi Arabia and Judaism is the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths.
Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali dramatist and author from Santiniketan, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian Nobel laureate. He also authored both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems. C.V. Raman was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, in Physics.
The Bering Strait and Bering Sea separate the landmasses of Asia and North America and form the international boundary between Russia and the United States. They divide the Diomede Islands, with Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States, and at their nearest points Alaska and Russia are only 2.5 miles apart.