Short answers, pulled from the story.
Guyana is a country on the northern coast of South America, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, Suriname to the east, Brazil to the south and southwest, and Venezuela to the west. Its capital and largest city is Georgetown, and it is the only country in mainland South America with English as its official language.
Guyana achieved independence from the United Kingdom as a dominion on the 26th of May 1966 and became a republic within the Commonwealth on the 23rd of February 1970. It had been governed as British Guiana with a plantation-style economy until the 1950s.
Guyana's economy has been transformed since the discovery of crude oil in 2015 and the start of commercial drilling in 2019. Its economy grew by 49% in 2020, by some accounts the world's fastest-growing economy, and over 11 billion barrels of reserves have been found offshore since 2017.
Venezuela claims the Essequibo region, the land west of the Essequibo River that lies entirely within Guyana. An 1899 tribunal granted most of the disputed territory to British Guiana, but in December 2023 Venezuela held a referendum that passed with a 95% majority on the annexation of Essequibo, while Guyana pursues the case at the International Court of Justice.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name Guyana comes from an Indigenous Amerindian language and means "land of many waters." It derives from The Guianas, an earlier name for a larger region north of the Amazon River and east of the Orinoco River.
Guyana has one of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world, home to more than 225 species of mammals, 900 species of birds, 880 species of reptiles, and over 6,500 species of plants. Forests cover more than 80% of the country, and over 70% of the natural habitat of the Guiana Shield remains pristine.