NCERT Book Class 12 Geography (Fundamentals Of Human Geography) Chapter 2 The World Population Distribution, Density and Growth

The people of a country are its real wealth. It
Unit-II is they, who are the actual resources and make
Chapter-2 use of the country’s other resources and decide
its policies. Ultimately a country is known by
its people.
It is important to know how many women
and men a country has, how many children are
born each year, how many people die and how?
Whether they live in cities or villages, can they
read or write and what work do they do? These
are what you will study about in this unit.
The world at the beginning of 21st century
recorded the presence of over 6 billion
population. We shall discuss the patterns of
their distribution and density here.
The World Population Why do people prefer to live in certain
Distribution, Density and regions and not in others?
The population of the world is unevenly
Growth distributed. The remark of George B. Cressey
about the population of Asia that “Asia has many
places where people are few and few place where
people are very many” is true about the pattern
of population distribution of the world also.

PATTERNS OF POPULATION
DISTRIBUTION IN THE WORLD
Patterns of population distribution and density
help us to understand the demographic
characteristics of any area. The term population
distribution refers to the way people are spaced
over the earth’s surface. Broadly, 90 per cent of
the world population lives in about 10 per cent
of its land area.
The 10 most populous countries of the
world contribute about 60 per cent of the world’s
population. Of these 10 countries, 6 are located
in Asia. Identify these six countries of Asia.
Not gold but only (Wo)men can make
a people great and strong.
(Wo)men who for truth and
honour’s sake, stand fast and suffer
long (Wo)men who toil while others
sleep – who dare while others flee –
they build a nation’s pillars deep and
lift it to the sky.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fig. 2.1: Most Populous Countries