Quiz 3 - Population

Carrying capacity - the number of people an area can support on a sustained basis given the prevailing technology.

Cohort  - a group of individuals who share a common temporal demographic experience; not necessarily bases only on age, but may also be defined based on criteria such as time of marriage or time of graduation; all individuals in a certain age range.

Demographic equation - summarizes the contribution made to regional population change over time by the combination of natural change (difference between births and deaths) and net migration (difference between in-migration and out-migration) Formula for population change:  P2 = P1 + B - D + I - O with P1 = population in time 1, P2 = population in time 2, B = births, D = deaths, I = in-migrants, and O = out-migrants.

Demographic momentum - (population momentum) the tendency for population growth to continue despite stringent family planning programs because of a relatively high concentration of people in the childbearing years.

Demographic regions and Population distributions - 1. 72.7% in Eurasia, 2. 7.9% in North America, 3. 13.2% in Africa, 4. 5.7% in South America, and 5. .5% in Australia and Oceania. With 21% in China, 17% in India, and only 4.6% in the United States. One in five humans lives in one valley in one province of China: Red Basin of Sichuan.

Demographic Transition - the process of change in a society’s population from a condition of high crude birth and death rates and low rate of natural increase to a condition of low crude birth and death rates, low rate of natural increase, and a higher total population.

Dependency ratio - a simple measure of the number of economic dependents, old or young, that each 100 people in the productive years (usually 15-64) must support. Population pyramids give quick visual evidence of that ratio.

Diaspora - scattered settlements of a particular national group living abroad.

Diffusion of fertility control - how fertility rates are lowered; during the final two stages of the demographic transition depend on both the successful cultural diffusion of effective methods of birth control and the widespread acceptance of the notion that small families are preferable to large ones; fertility decline became accepted as countries industrialized largely because children were no longer needed to help with farm work.

Disease diffusion - epidemiology: branch of medical science concerned with the incidence, distribution, and control of diseases that affect large numbers of people; uses geographic concepts to understand the distribution and method of diffusion of diseases; one might expect all diseases to spread exclusively by contagious diffusion, in fact they spread through all types of diffusion: relocation in the forms of tourism, long-distance truck drivers; hierarchical such as AIDS in urban areas.

Doubling time - the number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase.

Ecumene - that part of the earth’s surface physically suitable for permanent human settlement; the permanently inhabited areas of the earth.

Epidemiological Transition Model - distinctive causes of death in each stage of the demographic transition; stage s1 and 2 are the stages of pestilence and famine, infectious and parasitic diseases, and accidents and attacks by animals and other humans; stages 3 and 4 are the stages of degenerative and human-created diseases, e.g., cardiovascular diseases and cancer; stage 5 is the stage of reemergence of infectious and parasitic diseases.

Fertility - the natural capability to produce offspring.

Gender roles - culturally specific notions of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, are closely tied to how many children are produced by couples.

Geodemography - population geography, the study of the spatial and ecological aspects of population, including density, distribution, fertility, gender, living standard, health, age, nutrition, mortality, and mobility.

Infant mortality rate - the number of infants per 1,000 live births who die before reaching one year of age.

J- Curve - a curve depicting exponential or geometric growth.

Maladaptation -  an adaptation that is less helpful than harmful; It can also signify an adaptation that, whilst reasonable at the time, has become less and less suitable and more of a problem or hindrance in its own right, as time goes on. This is because it is possible for an adaptation to be poorly selected or become less appropriate or even become on balance more of a dysfunction than a positive adaptation, over time. 

Morality - death rate, the number o deaths per year per thousand population.

Natality - birth rate, the number of live births per year per thousand population.

Neo-Malthusian -  argue two main points: 1. the gap between population growth and resources is wider in some countries; 2. the world population growth is outstripping a wide variety of resources , not just food production; viewpoint held that in order to lift living standards, the existing national efforts to lower mortality rates had to be balanced by governmental programs to reduce birth rates.

Overpopulation - the number of people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living.

Pandemic - a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects a high proportion of the population.

Physiological density - the number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.

Population explosion - a dramatic increase in world population since 1900. The crucial element triggering this explosion has been a dramatic decrease in the death rate, particularly for infants and children, in most of the world.

Population projection - estimates of future population size, age, and sex composition based on current data.

Population pyramid - a bar graph representing the distribution of population by age and sex.

Rate of natural increase - the percentage growth of a population in a year, computed as the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate.

S- Curve - the horizontal bending, or leveling, of an exponential or J-curve.

Standard of living - refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people and the way these services and goods are distributed within a population. It is generally measured by standards such as income inequality, poverty rate, real (i.e. inflation adjusted) income per person. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, educational standards and social rights are often used too. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a country are able to satisfy their wants.

Sustainability - the survival of a land-use system for centuries or millennia without destruction of the environmental base, allowing generation after generation to continue to live there.

Thomas Malthus - English economist and cleric was the most famous pioneer observer of population growth with the publishing in 1798 of An Essay on the Principle of Population, known as the “dismal essay.” He believed that the human ability to multiply far exceeds our ability to increase food production. He maintained that “a strong and constantly operating check on population” will necessarily act as a natural control on numbers. He regarded famine, disease, and war as the inevitable outcome of the human population’s outstripping the food supply.

Underpopulation - circumstances of too few people to sufficiently develop the resources of a country or region to improve the level of living of its inhabitants.

Zero population growth - when the total fertility rate ( measured as the average number of children born per woman during her reproductive lifetime, considered to be from 15 to 44 years of age) or TFR is at 2.1 which is a stabilized population, one that does not increase or decrease.