Location, Location, Location — Distribution & Density
Picture your whole friend group crowding around ONE lunch table while three empty tables sit right next to you. Geographers have a term for people bunching up in one part of an area instead of spreading out evenly. What's the term for this pattern?
Clustered (nucleated) distribution
On a population pyramid, ages get sorted into five-year chunks like 0-4, 5-9, and 10-14. What's the term for one of these age groups?
A cohort
Geographers use two stats to measure how many babies are being born. One is dead simple: total live births per 1,000 people. The other zooms in on women of childbearing age and estimates how many kids the average woman will have. Name both.
Crude birth rate (CBR) and total fertility rate (TFR)
In 1979, one country made it illegal -- with fines -- for most families to have more than one child, a rule that lasted until 2016. Name the country, and the general term for a policy designed to DECREASE births.
China; an antinatalist policy
In the 1970s, factory workers across Michigan and Pennsylvania lost jobs as factories closed. Many moved south to states like Tennessee and Kentucky, where new factories were hiring. Name the factor that PUSHED them out of the Rust Belt and the factor that PULLED them south.
Push: unemployment/factory closures. Pull: new manufacturing jobs opening up in the South.
Singapore crams in nearly 20,000 people per square mile, but only 0.8% of its land can actually grow food. Geographers use a density measure that only counts farmable land, to show how much pressure a place's food supply is really under. What is that measure called?
Physiological population density
Niger's population pyramid looks like an actual pyramid -- a huge wide base that narrows sharply toward the top, kind of like a trend a million kids jump on that barely any adults ever hear about. What does a wide base tell you about a population's growth?
High birth rate; young and rapidly growing population (DTM Stage 2)
There's a shortcut for estimating how many years it takes a population to double in size: 70 divided by the annual growth rate. If a country grows at 2% per year, how many years until it doubles?
35 years (70 / 2 = 35) -- the "Rule of 70" / population doubling time
France, Sweden, and Japan all pay for childcare, offer paid parental leave, and run ad campaigns encouraging couples to have more kids because their populations are aging fast. What's the term for a policy designed to INCREASE the birth rate?
Answer: A pronatalist policy
Case 22 · 200 pts A migrant trying to reach a destination is blocked by a desert, a border wall, or a lack of money. What do geographers call these roadblocks? Now that same migrant instead finds a good job halfway there and just stays, changing the whole plan. What's THAT called?
Intervening obstacles (the roadblocks); intervening opportunity (the detour that changes the destination)
In 1950, Canada built a town called Alert on the frozen edge of the Arctic to watch the Soviet Union -- the northernmost inhabited place on Earth, colder than a chest freezer most of the year. Nobody picked that spot for the weather. What TYPE of factor -- not physical, like climate or soil -- explains why a place like Alert gets settled at all?
A human/political factor influencing population distribution (government decision)
Right after a war ends, birth rates often spike for several years -- geographers have a name for that spike. Decades later, when those "spike babies" grow up and have kids of their own, it shows up as a second, smaller bump on the pyramid. Name both.
Baby boom (the spike); echo (the later, smaller bump from the boomers' own kids)
Match each country to its stage in the Demographic Transition Model: Niger, Turkey, France, and Japan. One is Stage 2 (wide-base pyramid, explosive growth). One is Stage 3 (urbanizing fast, growth slowing). One is Stage 4 (stable, low growth). One is Stage 5 (aging and shrinking).
Niger = Stage 2, Turkey = Stage 3, France = Stage 4, Japan = Stage 5
In Ghana, girls with zero years of schooling had about 7 children on average. Girls who finished 12 years of schooling had about 2. What does this show is one of the most powerful levers for lowering a country's total fertility rate?
Girls'/women's access to education -- more schooling delays marriage and childbirth and opens up economic opportunity
Sort these into their correct terms: (1) A family moves village -> small city -> bigger city -> capital, three separate moves. (2) Migrants from the U.S. settle in a Mexican town specifically because other Americans already live there. (3) In the 1990s, as Mexicans migrated to the U.S., some Americans were moving to Mexico at the very same time.
(1) Step migration. (2) Chain migration. (3) Counter migration.
Downtown Chicago's "Loop" packs in about 21,000 people per square mile -- more than double the density of the neighborhoods around it. What's the word for the sewer systems, power grids, roads, and water lines a place needs to support that many people stacked on top of each other?
Infrastructure
Kuwait's population pyramid has an odd, oversized bulge of extra males specifically in their 30s -- way more than births alone explain. It isn't a war and it isn't a baby boom. What's pulling all those extra working-age men into the country?
Guest workers migrating in for jobs, mainly in the oil industry (a demographic/economic pull factor)
One thinker, writing in 1798, argued population grows faster than food supply and we're headed for mass starvation unless growth is checked. A Danish economist named Ester Boserup fired back nearly two centuries later with the opposite idea: more people means more hands to invent solutions, not just more mouths to feed. Name both theories.
Malthusian theory (Thomas Malthus) and Boserup theory (Ester Boserup)
Japan's average age is 49. Iraq's average age is 21 -- a bigger gap than between a high schooler and their teacher. Name TWO real consequences a country faces when its population skews as old as Japan's.
Any two of: rising healthcare/pension costs, a shrinking workforce, labor shortages, political power shifting to older voters, more reliance on immigration to fill jobs
During the Syrian Civil War, more than 6 million people fled their homes but stayed inside Syria, while more than 4 million crossed into other countries entirely. Name the term for the first group, the term for the second, and the term for formally requesting protection from the country you've fled to.
Internally displaced persons / IDPs (stayed in-country); refugees (crossed a border); asylum (the protection requested from the receiving country)
Egypt and Japan both have physiological densities over 8,000 people per square mile of farmable land. Japan pays to import food; Egypt struggles to. Both numbers point to a bigger idea: the number of people a region's land and resources can support without wrecking the environment. What's that concept called?
Carrying capacity
In Niger, 49% of the population is under 15 and only 3% is over 64, against a working-age group of 48%. Add the young and old, then divide by the working-age slice, to get a number comparing workers to everyone they're supporting. Name the calculation, and say whether Niger's result (about 1.08) is better or worse for the economy than the U.S. result (about 0.52)
The dependency ratio; Niger's 1.08 is worse -- more dependents than workers, so each worker supports more people than in the U.S.
A model tracks how the leading causes of death shift as a country develops -- from famine and infectious disease, toward "lifestyle" diseases like heart disease and cancer as people live longer. COVID-19 broke one of its core assumptions. Name the model, and the assumption COVID-19 challenged.
The epidemiological transition model; COVID-19 challenged the idea that pandemics fade away once a country is wealthy and modern -- instead, global connectedness helped it spread everywhere fast.
The U.S. has a dependency ratio around 0.52. Niger's is around 1.08. Which country's working-age population is under more economic strain, and why does the math say so?
Niger's -- a ratio of 1.08 means more dependents (children + elderly) than workers, so each worker supports more than one dependent, versus about half a dependent per worker in the U.S.
When a country loses a big share of its most educated, skilled people to other countries -- doctors and engineers who study abroad and never come home -- what's that phenomenon called? And what's the term for money those emigrants send back home, which can make up close to 40% of some small countries' income?
Brain drain (loss of skilled workers); remittances (money sent home)