Conducting population studies is of paramount importance and can take place at regional or global levels; the first refers to the search for information about the inhabitants of a municipality, state or country; the second is more comprehensive, as it establishes a grouping of information, as it is research that take into account population aspects of various countries, continents and the total number of people in the world.
Knowing the populations in terms of number and their socioeconomic conditions is necessary to implement projects and measures that meet the reality of a given population. The census, when carried out, aims to know the number of inhabitants, vegetative growth rates, birth rates, mortality rates, quality of life, distribution of income etc., such information serves for governments to carry out annual budgets directed to public services, such as education, health, infrastructure, employment generation and many others.
In 2010, some estimates revealed that the world population has already exceeded 6.9 billion people, there are perspectives that by the year 2050 the number of inhabitants should reach 9 billion. The number of inhabitants must be analyzed for several reasons, especially to gain knowledge about the resources offered by the planet (water, minerals, fuels, fertile soils etc), in addition, it is important to highlight the issues of income distribution, food availability and the limitations of nature.
The procedure used to analyze all aspects of the population occurs through statistics. Population corresponds to the set of inhabitants who live in a given place, which can be neighborhood, city, state, country, continent, in which questionnaires are carried out to obtain information on different topics.
Through this type of procedure it is possible to know the number of inhabitants, age structure, number of inhabitants per house, the division of citizens by sex, in addition to data such as the number of TVs, which helps to know the level of consumption of the inhabitants and the distribution of income.
In order to know the configuration of a population, each country has an agency responsible for cataloging, crossing the information and sending it to the government, people and interested companies. In Brazil, the responsible body is the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), which annually carries out the census to design thematic data on the Brazilian population.
The total number of a population at different levels, such as a neighborhood, municipality, state, country, is called absolute population, when a country has a high number it is called populous. Regarding the number of inhabitants, currently the most populous countries are: China 1.3 billion, India 1.1 billion, United States 314.6 million, Indonesia 229.9 million, Brazil 190.7 million, Pakistan 180.8 million, Bangladesh 162.2 million, Nigeria 154.7 million, Russia 140.8 million, and Japan with 127.1 million of population.
The high number of inhabitants on the planet is not evenly distributed, as Asia is the most populous continent with approximately 4.1 billion people, while Oceania has only 37.1 million inhabitants, in the world there are vast areas without or with little demographic occupation, generally they are desert places, cold areas or forests.
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By Eduardo de Freitas
Graduated in Geography
