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CHAPTER TWO
GLOBAL POPULATION TRENDS
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Become familiar with the basic historical facts of world population growth.
2. Understand how and why the world’s population is distributed as it is around the globe.
3. Understand the current regional patterns of population size and growth in all parts of the world.
4. Comprehend the major regional demographic contrasts that exist today.
MAIN POINTS
1. During the first 90 percent of human existence, the population of the world had grown only to the size of
today’s New York City.
2. Between 1750 and 1950, the world’s population mushroomed from 800 million to 2.5 billion, and since 1950 it
has expanded to more than 7 billion.
3. Despite the fact that humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, more than 1 in 10 people ever
born is currently alive.
4. Early population growth was slow not because birth rates were low but because death rates were high; on the
other hand, continuing population increases are due to dramatic declines in mortality without a matching decline
in fertility.
5. World population growth has been accompanied by migration from rapidly growing areas into less rapidly
growing regions. Initially, that meant an outward expansion of the European population, but more recently it
has meant migration from less developed to more developed nations.
6. Migration has also involved the shift of people from rural to urban areas, and urban regions on average are
currently growing more rapidly than ever before in history.
7. Although migration is crucial to the demographic history of the United States and Canada, both countries have
grown largely as a result of natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—after the migrants arrived.
8. At the time of the American Revolution, fertility levels in North America were among the highest in the world.
Now they are low, although not as low as in Europe.
9. The world’s 10 most populous countries are the People’s Republic of China, India, the United States, Indonesia,
Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Japan. Together they account for 59 percent of the world’s
population.
10. Almost all of the population growth in the world today is occurring in the less developed nations, leading to an
increase in the global demographic contrasts among countries.
EXAMINATION QUESTIONS
Multiple-Choice (Choose the single best answer—the page where the answer is found is indicated in parentheses)
