World Population Milestones Throughout History
Articles/Websites
Grades9, 10, 11, 12, APGeography, Mathematics
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Provided by Population Connection
What it is
- This article describes historical human population levels, how our population has changed over time, why these changes occurred, and what the future of human population looks like for the near future.
- It highlights the exponential growth that occurred after major biological discoveries drastically lowered the death rate of children and that supporting the rights of women to plan their pregnancies is a needed solution worldwide.
Teaching tips
Positives
- This resource provides a connection between the size of a population and the agricultural, biological, and industrial impacts of supporting that population.
- Each graph includes a description of the data and an explanation of why certain changes in population growth have occurred.
- The downloadable data from the UN provides a vast amount of information that can be used for a variety of investigations, graphing exercises, or statistical analyses.
Additional Prerequisites
- Before reading the article, students should be familiar with terms like death rates, birth rates, fertility rates, less developed countries, and consumption levels.
- You may want to have students watch this video animation of human population through time before reading the article.
Differentiation
- This resource can be used in math classes during lessons about interpreting graphs, trend lines, determining slope, and linear, exponential, and logarithmic functions.
- Social studies classes can use this article for lessons about demographics, human rights, gender equity, women's empowerment, access to education and resources, or cultural differences.
- For additional context, have students watch this video about how empowering women helps fight climate change, this animated video to learn more about the history of population growth and demographic transitions, or this video that connects human population growth to climate change. Alternatively, students can go through this interactive course about how we have changed the planet over the last 250 years and how population is connected to those changes.
- To extend the lesson, try integrating this activity to help build empathy and awareness.
From the scientist review
The resource shows estimated and projected global population for the recent past, present, and future. Biodiversity, natural resources, the environment, and development are all under pressure from population growth. This document is crucial to understanding how human interactions over time affect population shifts. It is suggested that teachers use this resource because it is an essential reference tool.
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