The World Population: Distribution, Density and Growth
Where people live
Calculate population density.
The people of a country are its real wealth: they use its resources and make its policies. So understanding how many people there are, where they live and how their numbers change is central to human geography.
People are spread very unevenly over the earth. About 90% of the world's people live on only about 10% of its land. The ten most populous countries together hold about 60% of the world's population, and six of them are in Asia.
The ratio of people to land is the density of population:
Density = population ÷ area, measured in persons per square kilometre.
For example, a region with 50,000 people on 200 sq km has a density of 50,000 ÷ 200 = 250 persons per sq km.
Even within one continent, density varies hugely. The geographer George B. Cressey said of Asia that it has many places with few people and few places with very many people: crowded river plains and coasts beside almost empty deserts and mountains.
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