Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and this is geography.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to a new unit of work.

Where we're going to be learning all about geography.

We're going to be focusing on population.

We're going to be thinking about how many people live in the world, where they live and the distribution of where they live around the UK, where we live our country, and all around the world.

And I can't wait to get started with you and for you to join us with thousands of other students across the country.

All learning about this incredibly interesting geography subject.

First lesson on population is going to be learning all about where all the people are.

So where are all the people? That's our little question that we will be answering today.

And our lesson structure looks, something like this.

So first of all, we're going to have a look at the world population and how that's changed over time.

That's going to involve some graph study by the way.

So get ready for that.

Then we'll look at the population density.

So that's how closely people live together across the UK.

And we'll study that to get to know our country better.

Then we'll look at how population will go wider and look at how population is distributed across the world.

So we get a local picture of our country and a world picture as well.

And then you'll have a chance to do your end of the lesson quiz.

Make sure that you are really well organised, please.

So make sure that you've got a pen or a pencil.

It will be helpful for you to have a ruler for this lesson as well.

Make sure that you've got a book or a notebook or an exercise book or some paper to work on and make sure that you're really ready to be present.

When, the reason I said I want your brain is I want all of your brain, okay? So I want you to focused just on this lesson.

Distractions away.

Make sure you've got enough time to finish this lesson and think really hard about everything that we're learning about.

So you become even smarter and learn much more about geography.

That said, we're ready to start.

Our first question is, what's the world population? I'm going to show you a graph to help with this.

So this graph shows the world population changing over time.

Have a closer look at it.

At the bottom you'll notice, along the X axis, you'll notice that there's the years.

The year 1700 over 300 years ago.

The year 1750.

The year 1800.

Point to it.

Point to the 1850.

Point to the year 1900.

Point to the year 1950.

Sure your pointing here.

So again, forward in time, along the X axis.

And you can see that as we go forward in time, the population increases.

It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And this is where we are today.

It's the year 2020.

The last bit of data that we have for the world population was from 2019.

When there were about 7.

7 billion people.

Obviously it's changing all the time.

And this graph gives a projection.

It predicts what the population will be like in the future.

And very, very clever scientists, very, very clever geographies use the data that we have and everything they know about the world to make good predictions about what the population of the world will be in the future.

So by 2100, they expect that the population of the world will be about 11.

2 billion.

So let's see if you can analyse this graph.

That's what great geographers do.

They use, they analyse data to understand the world.

It's going to feel a little bit like a math lesson, perhaps that's because geographers are also mathematicians and they're scientists, and they use their investigation skills to find out about the world and better understand the world.

So let's if you can do it.

I'm going to give you a question.

Your first question is, what was the population of the world and 1700? So have a look at that graph, find the year 1700 and find the population of what the world was in 1700 and write that down.

Excellent.

So we should have got 600 million.

The population of the world was about 600 million in the year 1700.

So for a long, long time, the population was really quite steady.

It was really quite stable.

It didn't grow that quickly.

And in just the last 60 or 70 years, the population has hugely increased.

Okay, well done for doing that one.

Let's have a look at another one to see if your analysis skills are as good as I'm sure that they are.

What was the population in 1800? So again, look at the X axis, find the year, then put your finger up along the graph to find the population.

Have you written it down? Great, you should have written down 1 billion.

I can see the year 1800 and 1 billion there.

So the population was 1 billion in the year 1800.

Trickier one for you now.

This is going to feel a little bit like a maths lesson, your math teacher's probably always telling you maths is so important.

Well, this shows you why.

You needing to use our math skills to understand how population has changed because between 1950 and 2000, the population of the world grew hugely.

It moved from 2.

5 billion to 7.

7 billion.

So how much of an increase is this? How much of an increase is it between 2.

5 billion and 7.

7 billion? How many more people in those years? So that's an increase of about 5.

2 billion.

About 5.

2 billion, more people in just that short period of time.

And since the year 2000, the population has been growing at a faster and faster rate.

Since the year 2000, the population has been growing at a faster and faster rate.

Is that true or false? False.

So you might be thinking, "huh false, what?" It looks like the population has been growing faster and faster and faster since the year 2000.

But let's have a closer look at our graph because you'll see that, although the population increases here.

The rate of the population is actually slowing down.

So there are lots and lots more people, which means that the population still grows.

Even if people have fewer children.

So this purple line tells us that although people, although the population is still growing since the year 2000, here, this purple line tells us that the speed that it's growing at is actually decreasing.

It's getting a little bit complex, isn't it? But that's okay.

That's what makes it really interesting going, "Oh gosh, what different data sources." We can understand the world a little bit better by comparing them.

Well done.

Started with some tough maths there.

Really impressive.

I've got one more question for you.

What was the population of the world in 2019? So recent population measure.

What was the population world in 2019? Written it down? 7.

7 billion.

So that's our most recent population estimate.

And so the population will be a bit bigger than that now, maybe something like 7.

8 billion.

So the population of the world now is almost 8 billion people okay? Almost 8 billion people.

So we'll say approximately 8 billion people.

So that's the whole world.

Let's now take a closer look at just the UK okay? So let's look at the population density of the UK.

So here's the UK.

The United Kingdom made up of the four nations of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England.

Let's see if you can point to those different nations.

Let's see if you can point to Wales.

Can you find Wales on that map of the UK? Awesome, well done if you're pointing here.

Here's whales this little bit that sticks out here.

The glorious nation of Wales.

Can you find the wonderful nation of Scotland? Where's Scotland? Excellent, if you're pointing here.

Scotland the northern most part of the United Kingdom.

I've missed a bit of Scotland off there actually.

Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands are up there.

So this is Scotland.

What about Northern Ireland? Can you find Northern Ireland on this map? Point to it.

Yeah, well done.

Northern Island over here.

So Northern Ireland and you can see the boundary here, is part of the UK.

And the country of Ireland here is not part of the UK.

It's an independent country.

So it's part of the British Isles, but it's not part of the UK.

The UK is England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

And lastly, where's England? Excellent, England, all of this bit here, right down to Devon and Cornwall in the bottom corner.

So here's a picture of a map, and here's a picture of what the UK looks like.

And you can see I've taken off Ireland there.

So it's just gotten Northern Ireland.

Now Ireland is still there of course, but the UK just refers to these four nations.

So let's have a look at the population density of the UK.

So you can see that there's a map here and this map has different kinds of colours on it okay? So we need to take a closer look at these colours and geographers are really good at doing this.

They use different visual representations of data.

So it's not always graphs.

They sometimes take data and put it directly onto maps so that we can understand those maps.

So that's a bit better.

So you can see here that there's different shades of brown and the darker the shade of brown, the more people who live close together, the higher the population density.

Population density is about people living close together.

So if something is dense, it means it's tightly packed.

And so in some places like I live in London, for example.

I live in a flat and there's lots of lots of people living really close together.

So the population density is very high because there's lots of people living on not much land.

In other places people live quite far away from each other.

You might live in a home and your neighbour could be half a mile or a mile away.

So the population density there is low.

It's sparsely populated.

We say sparsely.

My sparsely populated.

Say it out loud to get used to using the language.

Sparsely populated.

Excellent, you can put your hands away from each other.

Sparsely populated means that people live far away.

Densely populated, lots of people close together.

And this map of the UK helps us to see where population density is high, where there's lots of people living close together.

So have a close look at that map for a moment.

Can you spot where population density is high? Well overall there's 67 million people living in the UK.

This idea of population density tells us how many people live in a particular area.

If lots of people live close together, then we say it's densely populated.

And the more densely populated areas here are darker, that means that lots of people living close together.

So the darkest areas have over 5,000 people living in one square kilometre.

Okay, so population density is measured per square kilometre.

A square kilometre is about 140 football fields.

That's about how big it is.

So in some of these darker areas, it means for every square kilometre, for every 140 football fields, there are over 5,000 people living in that area.

And then there are other areas and there's less, there's less than 25 or there's fewer than 25 people living in that same amount of land.

The population density is much lower.

And if not many people are living in the same area, then we say it's sparsely populated.

That's the light colours.

So use your finger now to point to the screen and find the areas that are densely populated.

Which areas of the UK are the most densely populated? Do you know the names of any of these places? You might have found the darker places that are densely populated in.

Do you know the name of any of them? This is a great opportunity for you to do a little bit of independent and investigation work.

You might want to get to know the cities and counties of the UK better.

And so you might look at this and think, "Oh gosh, I'm not sure what city that is or I'm not sure what area that is." Now is a great chance.

There's plenty available online.

Through Google maps for you to investigate the different cities and the different counties and the different areas across the UK.

So you get better at spotting them when we do exercises like this.

So one area that you might have seen that is really densely populated up in Scotland.

Two cities here.

So we've got Edinburgh and Glasgow.

They are very dark and densely populated.

As we go further North into the Highlands in Scotland, much more dense, much more sparsely populated.

You might have noticed some of the cities up in the east of England, like New Castle, over in Yorkshire, where we've got, well we've got Manchester and Liverpool over here and Sheffield and York.

We've got Birmingham over here.

One of the most densely populated areas in the UK, London.

Over in Wales, we've got Cardiff, the capital city of Wales.

Here, the capital of Ireland, Dublin.

And the capital of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

So the major cities, the capital cities often very densely populated, lots of people living in those capital cities.

So let's zoom out a little bit now and think about the world.

So, we've seen how the people are distributed differently across the UK.

In some places, there are millions of people, all living quite close together, like in major cities like Birmingham and like Manchester and like London and like Belfast and Dublin and Edinburgh.

And there are other places where people live quite sparsely, populated.

People live quite far apart.

What about the world more generally though? Well, the population of the UK remember was 67 million about that.

The population of the UK is about 67 million.

That's how many people overall that are in the UK.

That's been quite steady for a while.

If we look at the whole world though.

We can see how many people live in each country.

And you'll see here, that although there are 67 million people in the UK, in China there are much, much more people living.

So this pie chart shows us how much of a percentage of the world's population live in each country And the UK isn't even on this pie chart, because it's such a small fraction.

We do not have too many people living in the UK compared to lots of other countries.

China, for example, has almost 20% of the world's population.

That means that about one in five people who live on the planet earth, live in China.

There's about 1.

4 billion people.

Well it's over 1.

4 billion people living in China.

Another country with lots and lots of people living in it is India.

Again, almost 1.

4 billion people.

The USA has over 300 million people.

And then some other countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, they all have lots and lots of people living there.

All of the other countries put together make up about a third of the world's population and the UK will be in there.

But each of them only has a small number of people compared to these other nations.

So altogether about 8 billion people living on earth.

About 1.

4 billion of those are China.

And about 1.

4 billion are India.

Slightly more than 1.

4 billion for China.

Slightly less than 1.

4 billion for India.

And the UK only 67 million.

Well, what would that comparison look like? Let me show you.

I've made a graph to show you that comparison.

This bar graph shows you the comparison between the UK and China in terms of population.

So we've got 1.

5 billion on the side here, and China's about 1.

4 billion.

It's a little bit more, than 1.

4 billion.

So it's almost at 1.

5 billion.

The UK on the other hand, 67 million.

So not even a billion people, not even close to a billion people in the UK.

So the population of India is missing from this graph, you'll notice that bar is missing.

I wonder if you can draw that bar in.

Now the population is estimated to be about 1 billion, 380,000 million, 4,385.

About 1.

38 billion.

So where would that go on this graph? Now, you're probably not used to dealing with such big numbers, but have a look at the Y axis and see if you can plot India next to China and draw a bar.

That means that you're probably going to have to take a minute because you're going to need to maybe find a ruler, draw this bar, and I'm sure that you'll do a great job of this.

Drawing a bar graph to show the comparisons of these different populations.

So you can get a feel of how populations are different compared the UK to other nations.

So pause the video now and have a go at completing this bar graph.

Okay, I wonder how you did? So we've got the UK with its 67 million.

We've got China with over 1.

4 billion and we're plotting India with 1 billion, 380 million, 4,385.

Your bar chart should look something like this.

Just under China.

It's close because it's almost 1.

4 billion.

We can see that 1.

4 billion would be 1 billion, 400 million.

And it's almost 400 million here.

So we've got the billions it's almost 400 million.

Remember a billion is 1000 million.

So, if you didn't quite get that right, that's fine.

You can draw, you can edit your bar graph now to make it look like this.

So that you can see that we live in the UK with 67 million people, which is a lot of people, but it's nothing compared to these other nations like India and China, which each have over a billion people.

Fascinating numbers.

Really interesting to find out about the populations of those different countries and where different people live.

And we're just getting a flavour now and a feel for the population of the world, the population of the UK, where people live and how we can understand that data.

Well done for working so hard today.

Well done for learning so many new facts and finding out so much more about the world that you live in.

The only thing left to do is to complete the quiz for the end of this lesson.

So after this, after you close this video, make sure you do that quiz, but I'm sure you'll be able to crack lots of those answers now.

And if you completed some lovely work and did a great bar graph and got lots of those answers correct, when we were analysing.

Then I'd love to see your work.

And the way that you can share it to me is by asking your parent or carer to take a photo and then asking to put it on to Twitter, post it onto Twitter.

And they just need to use the hashtag #ONApopulation.

Cause our new topic is population.

So if they use the hashtag #ONApopulation, they can put @OakNational.

Then I check the hashtag and I'll be able to read each of those.

I love to see your work.

Please send it in.

I know that there are thousands of you watching each of these lessons and doing all of these lessons, getting much, much smarter.

Well done for being one of them.

Well done for getting to the end of the lesson and why not share it so you can see what everybody else is doing and I can see your work.

I will see you for our next lesson.

We will continue to learn about the population of the world.

The population of the UK.

And I can't wait and we'll get to find out actually a bit about what affects population growth and makes it go bigger and smaller.

It's going to be really interesting.

I can't wait for you to join me.

Make sure you log on to that next lesson to continue our learning and I'll see you then.

Bye.