Unit-8
One planet, many people: how are populations changing?
• The number of people living in a particular place is known as the
population.
Population distribution
• It is the pattern of where people live and how populations are spread
out. Why is global population distribution uneven?
• Settlements have built up in areas with natural resources that can support
a population, such as water, soil, the ability to grow food, and job
opportunities.
• When it becomes more developed industries emerge and connections with
other settlements via roads, railways and rivers are made.
• In turn this creates more job opportunities and so an expending
population.
• Areas that are often sparsely populated tend to have fewer resources and
be harder to live in, such as mountainous areas, deserts or isolated
places.
Population and development
• A demographer is someone who studies population data collected
from the census at local, national and global levels.
• They study birth rate (the number of births per 1,000 of the country’s
population, each year) and the death rate (the number of deaths per
1,000 people per year.)
• Natural increase or decrease is the difference between the birth rate
and death rate in a country’s population.
• Demographers have created a Demographic Transition Model (DTM)
to describe different stages.
Using population pyramids
• Demographers use graphs called population pyramids to analyse the structure of
populations.
• A population pyramid is a graph that shows the age and gender distribution of a
given population.
• Gender is shown on the left and right sides, age on the y-axis, and the percentage
of population on the x-axis.
• Each grouping (e.g. males aged 0-4) is called cohort.
• These pyramids are useful for governments to better understand the composition
of their population.
• They can use them to make predictions about the types of services that the
population will need in the future, for example the numbers of schools, hospitals
and homes.
• Countries with a large proportion of older people must develop retirement systems
and medical facilities to serve them.
• Therefore, as a population ages, needs change from childcare and schools to jobs,
housing and medical care.
Can we control population size?
• When a country is underpopulated it doesn’t have enough people to
make use of the resources and technology available.
• This can cause economic problems if there are not enough workers to
produce goods for sale or to complete services.
• Where a country is overpopulated, it has too many people and not
enough resources to maintain a reasonable standard of living, which
slows down development.
Why do people migrate?
• A migrant is someone who moves from one place to another, with the intention of
living temporarily or permanently in the new location.
• Migration can occur internally, within a country, or between countries. • An
immigrant is someone who moves to live permanently in a different country. •
People that choose to move are voluntary migrants.
• Those that have no choice, who move due to war or natural disasters, are forced
migrants. They are called refugees.
• In 1966, E.S Lee devised a model to help explain the reasons why people
migrate. • Lee called these push and pull factors.
• The pushes are the things that make people want to leave, the pulls are the good
things that attract them to a new place.
• These factors must be strong enough to overcome the barriers or intervening
obstacles to move.
• Rural to urban migration is the movement of people from the
countryside to towns and cities within a country.
• This process is called urbanization.
• In the UK, Europe and the USA this happened during the Industrial
Revolution.
• There was a mass movement of people from the countryside to new,
rapidly growing cities, attracted to new jobs in the emerging factories.
• In 1900, the world’s largest city was London and out of the ten largest
cities that year only one was outside Europe and the USA.
