Population and cities Lesson 24 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 22 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 Imagine everyone on Earth standing in one long queue: about 8.2 billion people today. 1 In 1337, the year Europa Universalis 5 begins, the queue was perhaps only about 400 million long, fewer people than India alone has now. 2 People are not spread evenly like butter on toast. 3 They crowd into river valleys, coastal plains and fertile lowlands, and leave deserts, high mountains and icy lands nearly empty; look at Egypt, where almost everyone lives in the thin green strip along the Nile. 4 Cities grew at useful spots: where a river could be bridged, where a harbour was sheltered, where trade routes met. 5 London grew at the lowest point where the Thames could be bridged. 6 For most of history nearly everyone lived on the land and a city of 100,000 was huge. 7 Since about 2007 more than half of all people have lived in towns and cities, and some cities now hold over 10 million. 8 The game's starting map hides a disaster: just ten years after 1337 the Black Death reached Europe and killed perhaps a third to a half of its people. 9 Real numbers are only estimates, so historians give ranges, not exact counts like a game screen. 10 About 8.2 billion people live on Earth in 2026, compared with perhaps about 400 million around 1337. 11 India and China are the two most populous countries, each with about 1.4 billion people, and India overtook China around 2023. 12 Most people live in fairly small parts of the land: river valleys, coastal plains and fertile lowlands, while deserts, high mountains and polar lands are nearly empty. 13 Since about 2007 more than half the world's people have lived in towns and cities. 14 A megacity has more than 10 million people, and there are now over 30 of them, most in Asia, including Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Dhaka, São Paulo, Cairo and Lagos. 15 The largest cities of the 1300s, such as Constantinople, Paris or Hangzhou, had a few hundred thousand people at most. 16 The Black Death killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe's people between 1347 and 1351. 17 Population density means how many people live on each square kilometre, and Bangladesh has over 1,000 while Australia has about 3. 18 Some countries, such as Japan and Italy, have many old people and few births, while countries such as Niger have very young populations; with few births there will later be fewer young workers to look after the old. 19 The median age splits the people in half, half younger and half older; in Niger it is under 16, and in Japan it is about 49. 20 Most great cities grew at useful spots: river crossings, natural harbours, estuaries or meeting points of trade routes. 21 Migration means people moving to live in another place, inside their country or abroad. ← previous Weather, storms and the changing climatenext → Languages and peoples on the map↑ back to Geography This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/24-population-and-cities/