Introduction

The people of a country are its real wealth. This is the central idea that opens the chapter. A nation is ultimately known by its people — not by its gold or resources, but by the women and men who live there, who work, who make decisions, and who shape its policies. To understand any country, you need to know how many people it has, how many children are born each year, how many die and why, whether they live in cities or villages, whether they can read and write, and what work they do. These are the questions this unit will explore.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world recorded a population of over 6 billion. The chapter begins by examining the patterns of where these billions of people are distributed and how densely they are settled.

The world's population is unevenly distributed. This is the first major point the textbook makes. People do not spread themselves evenly across the Earth's surface. Some regions are crowded with people; others are nearly empty. The geographer George B. Cressey made a famous remark about Asia that applies equally well to the whole world: “Asia has many places where people are few and few places where people are very many.” In other words, vast areas have sparse populations, while a handful of areas are extremely densely populated. This unevenness is the fundamental pattern you need to understand before studying the reasons behind it.