Life Spans and Ages

By Isaac and Amos

This page is about the life spans and ages of people in the world. As you saw on the FrontPage, this project is based on the book If The World Were A Village by David J. Smith. In this book, the world is reduced to a village of 100 people, with one person equalling about 64 million people. This is done to make numbers easier to comprehend, and make percentages easier to understand. Therefore, with so many people in the real world compared to the Global Village, the numbers have to be rounded to make them work in the Global Village. In this Wiki, we aim to go over and above the data in the book. ~ Pete and Katherine

Death and Population Maps of the world.  The bigger areas on the top map show greater numbers of death; and the bottom map shows greater population.

November 1, 2007—Africa appears to swell like a balloon when the world is mapped according to

how many people died in 2002 due to diseases and other conditions that are largely preventable (top).

The continent appears much smaller by contrast in a map that sizes the countries of the world

according to their shares of the human population (bottom).

Back to top.

Life Spans of Humans in Different Countries

Here we have a graph showing the average life span of people living in each country. In the many countries of Africa, the inhabitants live amazingly short lives. This is because of how poor countries in Africa are, which could be helped if more countries in Africa started becoming industrialized. This would be bad, though, because it would increase pollution. Japan has the highest average life span of countries with averages over 80 years. Is this significant? It could be.

The most common cause for the shorter life spans of countries such as the countries of Africa is money. People with less money have less health care than "richer" people. They also have less education, shelter, food, and water. Without these basic needs, people die. Also, some people think that Japan's higher life spans are because of Japan's economy and the country's diet.

Have you noticed that people in Canada and France and some other countries have higher life expectancies than people in the US? This is because of the countries' social medicine. People in these countries can go to the doctor any time they want to. These countries rely on the interdependence of the doctors and people. Another interseting fact is that the life expectancy of an average person in the US just one hundred years ago was the same as most countries in Africa now, 45-50 years. To live for more than 50 years was considered living to be very old.

Dr. Lleras-Muney did some research on life spans and found that more education can result in a longer life. There are a lot of problems with this theory but it is generally true. It was proved that in the US, the life expectancy for a 35-year-old can be increased by one and a half years just by going to school for one extra year!

Below is an awesome graph showing average life spans in different countries.

<--------------------------------------------------------------<

This is the key for the graph in case you can't read the one on the actual graph.^

Back to top.

Age

The world is full of young people. That means that the global village is too. There are 3,805,648 people in the U.S. alone that are under one year of age. Why do we care? Well, if there are some poorly-living people in the world, that means that children are doing a lot of work.

This isn't bad. We can't control it. If we were animals we would have the balanced birth/death rate humans need. That doesn't mean we should try to die as soon as we can, though! So don't jump of a bridge! Please don't.

Back to top.

Below is a graph of the ages in tens in the Global Village.

Back to top.