POPULATION PYRAMIDS

The next exercise is to help you understand why population is growing so fast in countries like India, but not countries like the UK. We are going to look at a new kind of graph: a population pyramid:

If you look closely you will see that a population pyramid is really two graphs, the left hand side shows the number of males in different age groups in Sierra Leone (Africa), the right hand side shows the number of females. The bottom of this population pyramid is wider than the middle part. What does this tell you about the number of babies being born?.

Visit this web site which will draw population pyramids for you.

1) Draw a population pyramid for India. Select 1997 and small graph size. Copy the pyramid by right clicking on it with your mouse and save it to your desktop.

2) Do the same for the UK. You may like to look at pyramids for other countries too. Try to look at a mixture of poor and rich countries. Do you notice any pattern?

3) Finally, copy the two population pyramids of India and the UK from your desktop into your Word document that you created last lesson, and move on to the quiz :