Geography Quiz: World Population: Distribution, Density and Growth

Density of population is a ratio between the number of people and the area they occupy, and the standard unit is the number of persons living in one square kilometre; it is the simplest way of measuring the pressure of people on land.

In this essay of 1798 Malthus argued that population tends to increase in a geometric progression while the means of subsistence can increase only in an arithmetic progression, so growth must be restrained either by positive checks such as famine, disease and war, or by preventive checks such as late…

The United Nations marked 15 November 2022 as the Day of Eight Billion, the date on which the world population was estimated to have reached eight thousand million.

Replacement level fertility is the total fertility rate at which a generation of women exactly replaces itself in the next generation.

In the first stage of the demographic transition the society is rural and agrarian, life expectancy is low, medical facilities are poor and literacy is low, so both the birth rate and the death rate are high and they roughly cancel each other, leaving population almost stationary.

The width of each bar in a population pyramid shows the share of that age group, so a broad base means that children form a very large part of the population, which happens where the birth rate is high; the narrow top shows that few people survive to old age.

Asia holds roughly three-fifths of all the people in the world, mainly in the two great clusters of East Asia and South Asia, which include the two most populous countries on earth.

Natural growth is the increase that comes from the balance of births over deaths alone, so it is births minus deaths in the period, and it is negative when deaths exceed births.

Push factors are the unfavourable conditions of the place a person leaves, such as unemployment, poverty, crop failure, drought, flood, epidemic and political unrest; they push people out.

Physiological density divides the total population of a region by the area of its cultivable or arable land, so it measures the pressure of all the people on the land that can actually grow food, and it is far higher than ordinary density in countries such as Egypt, where most…