Breathing Earth

Many thanks to Joel and his mum for reminding us about this site. Really interesting as we continue looking at population and development in year 9.

Year 9 Population

Now that we have returned for the New Year we begin our studies again in Population in year 9. This week we are going to compare population to a bath! If you are still puzzled by this then think of the water as people and think what the taps and plughole could represent, as you think about it more deeply, what about other things like the size of the bath or the overflow?

One of the important trends we have seen is that people are living longer. This has a big effect on the age of the population. We can see this effect on something called a population pyramid. We will be covering this over the next couple of weeks but if you want to have a look at what is predicted to happen and even have a play around with some possible outcomes try this out. Just click on start simulation, after 2050 you can use the sliders to adjust how long people live and how many babies are born. What happens for example if birth rate falls?

Population and Development

Year 9 are about to start their new topic of Population and Environment. With ever increasing pressures on our planets resources the scene is set for an exploration into one of worlds most pressing issues. In the first few lessons we will look at how many people there are in the world. You might want to check this out for yourself by looking at a World Clock. We will also think about the worlds resources with this short film giving us food for thought. The map above shows world population the larger the country the bigger the population, you can find more of these on the worldmapper website.

Population and Development

The school theme this week has been "Developing Countries" and in year 9 we have just started our new topic of population and development. To introduce the topic we looked at the population counter and saw just how fast the worlds population is growing. We also agreed that a world with over 6.6 billion people living on it is really hard to get our head around. To help us we watched miniature earth which shows us what the world would be like as a community of only 100 people. Which poses the question; if we lived in a community where only 3 of the hundred owned 59% of the wealth would we do anything about it?

It's the World, but not as we know it!!

The map above was taken from the Worldmapper web site. On this site you can see many images of the World distorted to show information. The example above is of World Population and each country is the correct size for its populaton rather than its land area. Can you see any surprises? Perhaps you can explore the site and send us comments back on what catches your attention.