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Demography

Autor:   •  March 18, 2011  •  Essay  •  1,387 Words (6 Pages)  •  1,557 Views

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Demography

Population growth is the single most important set of events ever to occur in human history. Today, we now live in a world crowed not only with people but also with contradiction. There are more highly educated people than ever before, yet also more illiterates, more rich people, but also more poor; more well fed children, but also more hunger-ravaged babies whose images haunts us. We have better control over our environment than before.

Our partial mastery of the environment is, indeed, key to understanding why the population is growing because we have learned how to conquer more and more of the diseases that once routinely killed us. Dramatic drop in mortality all over the world is one of the humanity greatest triumphs. However, birth rates almost never go down in tandem with the decline in death rate, the result is rapid population growth. It has resulted in both environmental damage and social upheaval.

Population growth does make implacable demands on natural and societal resources that will certainly be detrimental to long term health of the planet and its inhabitants, human. Virtually every social, political, and economic problem facing the world has demographic change as one of its root causes.

Democracy is the scientific study of human populations. Demos, which means people and graphy, which means the branch of knowledge relating to a particular science (in this instance, population.) Modern democracy is the study of the determinants and consequences of population change and is concerned with virtually everything that influences or can be influenced by:

- Population size (how many people there are in a given place)

-population growth or decline (how the number of people in that place is changing over time.)

- Population processes (the level and trends in mortality, fertility, and migration that are determining population size and change.)

-population distribution (where people are located and why)

- Population structure (how many males and females there are of each age)

- Population characteristics (what people are like in a given place, in terms of variables such as education, income, occupation, family and household relationships, immigrant and refugee status, and the many other characteristics that add up to who we are as individuals or groups of people.

The past was predominantly rural and the present is predominantly urban. The past was predominantly pedestrian (there were only 8000 passenger cars in 1900) and the present is heavily dependent on the automobile (w more than 130 million passenger cars being driven around the country.) The past was young, with 34% of the population age of 15 and only 4 percent aged 65 and older; whereas the present

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