Economics Principles and Practices © 2012 Georgia

Chapter 12: Macroeconomic Performance

Web Activity Lesson Plans


"Learning About Population"

Introduction
Population trends are important to many groups. Politicians watch population shifts to see how voting patterns may change. Community leaders are interested because increases or decreases in local population impact services such as sanitation, education, crime prevention, and fire protection. Businesses use census data to help determine new plant locations, products and services, and sales territories.

Lesson Description
For this activity, students will use information from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database Web site to examine current statistics related to population.

Previous Knowledge Expected
Students should be familiar with the following terms:
life expectancy: average remaining life span in years for persons who attain a given age
population pyramid: diagram showing the breakdown of population by age and sex

Applied Content Standards (from the Council for Economic Education)
Standard 1: Productive resources are limited. Therefore, people cannot have all the goods and services they want; as a result, they must choose some things and give up others.
Standard 15: Investment in factories, machinery, new technology, and the health, education, and training of people can raise future standards of living.

Instructional Objectives

  1. Students will generate and interpret a population pyramid.

  2. Students will list types of data available on the International Database.

  3. Students will list the current ranking of countries by population.

Student Web Activity Answers

      1-4: Answers will vary. Current figures should be obtained from the Web site.

Extending the Lesson
Encourage students to create population pyramids for other countries. Have them compare the results. Which countries have greater populations in the bottom section of the pyramid? Which at the top?
Have each student select a population statistic that is available on the site. Have students present the current figure and the importance of that figure to the class.


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