THE Life expectancy – also called hope of life – is a statistic that tries to estimate how long people of a certain age group are expected to live in a certain place. Generally, this rate is calculated based on the living conditions and health of the population, as well as other indices such as the number of accidents, illnesses and mortality rates.
When we say that a given country has a life expectancy of 69 years, it does not mean that all people will reach that age and, shortly thereafter, will die. It just means that the trend is for the average population to reach this age, with some exceeding this value and others not so much...
Brazil, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), has a life expectancy of 74 years, while in Japan (first place in the world in this regard), this figure is 83 years, and in Sierra Leone (last place), of 47 years. This means that Japanese people can live, on average, nine years longer than Brazilians, who, in turn, can live twenty-seven years longer than the population of Sierra Leone, an African country.
Life expectancy in Brazil, despite not being considered one of the best, has been improving over the past few years. In 1990, the age was 66 years old, going to 68 in 2000 and reaching 74 in 2012. Among men, according to the IBGE, the average life expectancy is 71 years, whereas among women it is 78.3.
It is important to remember that life expectancy is not only related to the population's quality of life, as the reasons are not always of death are diseases, hunger or natural causes, and may also be related to traffic and domestic accidents, among others factors.
However, among the lower classes, life expectancy rates are lower, whereas among the richest, higher. Data from 2005 showed that people who have an income above twenty minimum wages, in Brazil, had a life expectancy of 73.5 years, while among the population that earns between one and two salaries, the expectation was 59.7 years old.
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography