Q.A population has more young individuals compared to the older individuals. What would be the status of the population after some years?

A population with more young individuals than older ones has a high proportion of individuals in their pre-reproductive and reproductive age groups. This means that in the coming years, a large number of these young individuals will enter their reproductive phase and produce offspring. The birth rate will therefore remain high, while the death rate will be relatively low because there are fewer older individuals. As a result, the population will show a positive growth rate and its size will increase over time.

• The age structure directly determines the future growth trajectory of a population.
• A pyramid-shaped age structure with a broad base indicates a growing population.
• This is the opposite of a declining population, which has more older individuals.

This question is about age structure — one of the most revealing features of any population. In ecology, the proportion of individuals in different age groups (pre-reproductive, reproductive, and post-reproductive) tells us whether a population is growing, stable, or shrinking. The NCERT textbook makes this point very clearly: the age pyramids of human populations are a direct visual indicator of growth trends.

Think about what a "young" population means. If most individuals are in the pre-reproductive or early reproductive age groups, they will soon enter or remain in their childbearing years. Even if each pair has only a moderate number of offspring, the sheer number of potential parents is large. Over time, this produces more births than deaths, and the total population size rises.

Now, consider the opposite scenario. If a population had mostly older individuals and few young ones, it would decline because deaths would outnumber births. But here, the textbook is explicit: a population with a high proportion of young individuals is an expanding population. It will not stabilise or decline in the near future — it will increase.

Therefore, among the given options, the correct one is that the population will increase. It will not first decline and then stabilise, nor will it stabilise immediately. The momentum of a young age structure drives growth.

Translate the age description into the standard three-tier framework first (more young individuals means a broad pre-reproductive base), then read off the growth status that framework predicts, rather than guessing directly from the phrase 'more young individuals'.