The World Population

THE WORLD POPULATION

NUMBER AND DISTRIBUTION The world, at the beginning of twenty-first century, had over six billion people. The population had quadrupled from 1.6 billion just in one century. The UNDP projects the worldpopu­lation to be 7,210.3 million in 2015. The annual population growth during 1975-2003 was estimated to be 2.6 per cent.
Human population is spread unevenly across the continents. A few areas support large concentration of humanity, while vast areas support few people or none at all. Physical, cultural, economic and political factors influ­ence the population distribution.

DISTRIBUTION PATTERN The term population distri­bution refers to the way the people are spaced over the earth's surface. The ten most populous countries of the world-China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Rus­sia, Bangladesh, Japan and Nigeria-make up nearly 60 per cent of the world's population. Six of these ten countries are in Asia. No individual country of Europe is among the ten most populous countries of the world.

Asia accounts for only one-fifth of the world land area, but supports more than half the world's population; Europe, with only one-twenty-fifth of world land mass, supports one-ninth of world population; the American land mass occupies one-fourth of the total world land mass but has only a one-seventh share of world population; Africa with its share of a quarter of world's land surface, has only about one-tenth of the world's population.

Within the continents, too, population distribution is uneven: China and India within Asia account for two-thirds of the continent's population, and nearly one-third of that of the world. Far more people live in northern and western parts of Europe than in southern or eastern parts. Large portions of Africa and the Americas are practically unin­habited.