population

(pŏp'yə-lā'shən)
n.

1. 1. All of the people inhabiting a specified area.
   2. The total number of such people.
2. The total number of inhabitants constituting a particular race, class, or group in a specified area.
3. The act or process of furnishing with inhabitants.
4. Ecology. All the organisms that constitute a specific group or occur in a specified habitat.
5. Statistics. The set of individuals, items, or data from which a statistical sample is taken. Also called universe.

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A way of classifying stars on the basis of several properties, including location in the host galaxy, type of orbit, and heavy element content or metallicity; it was introduced by Walter Baade in 1943. In Baade's scheme there are two main population types: Population I and Population II. A more refined system, based on modern knowledge, sees our Galaxy and others made of four stellar populations: thin disk, thick disk, stellar halo, and bulge. The thin disk population is confined to within about 1,000 light-years of the galactic plane and includes the Sun and 96% of its neighbors. Thin disk stars are metal rich, vary in age from newborn to 10 billion years, and revolve around the Galaxy fast in fairly circular orbits. The thick disk population, which probably includes Arcturus and 4% of the Sun's neighbors, is generally older than the thin disk and extends several thousand light-years above the galactic plane. Its members move in elliptical orbits and have metallicities around one-quarter that of the Sun. The stellar halo population is a roughly spherical system of very metal-poor stars (1 to 10% of solar metallicity), mostly subdwarfs, that move in highly elliptical orbits that may reach up to 100,000 light-years from the galactic center at apogalacticon and as little as a few thousand light-years at perigalacticon. The nearest example of a halo star to the Sun is Kapteyn's Star. The bulge population occupies the central few thousand light-years of the Galaxy and consists of old, metal-rich stars. Since no such objects are in the solar neighborhood, this is the least explored stellar population in the Milky Way.

Set of data consisting of all conceivable observations of a certain phenomenon. A sample contains only part of these observations.
Examples of populations are: (1) number of defective and nondefective bolts produced in a factory on a given day; (2) heights and weights of students in a university; and (3) all possible outcomes (heads, tails) in successive tosses of a coin. Population can be finite or infinite. The first two examples are finite and the third example is infinite.
Assume the auditor wants to verify promotion and entertainment expense of the company. The population is the total expense for the accounting period under examination. A sample can be derived on a random basis to check selected promotion and entertainment documentation so as to derive an inference about the population balance.

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1. In ecology, a group of individuals of the same species within a community.

2. In statistics, the entire and complete collection of individuals under consideration, from which a sample may be taken. These individuals need not necessarily be living organisms.

Very few conclusions have been agreed about the population of the British Isles before the Norman Conquest. Large-scale migrations of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Norsemen, and substantial movements between Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, make estimates very hazardous. The population of Roman Britain remains highly conjectural with a disturbing divergence of scholarly opinion between 1 million and 6 million for the later 2nd cent. A figure of 20, 000 has been proposed for Wales, though there is no way of checking it. Nor is it easier to offer figures for the subsequent Saxon period, since we cannot be sure to what extent devastation and warfare were offset by new arrivals. The consensus puts the figure for England towards the end of the Saxon period at about 1" million. The most prudent historians of Ireland and Scotland refuse to suggest or endorse any estimates for those countries.

There is little disagreement that the population of England increased greatly between 1066 and the plague disasters of the mid-14th cent. If the estimates for William I's reign, based on Domesday Book returns, are correct, the population was about 1" million and had more than doubled by 1300 to about 4 million. This was part of a general European pattern, assisted in England after the Conquest by the absence of major invasions and a lessening of internal conflict. Plague then struck four times between 1349 and 1375 with devastating consequences. It seems that over 40 per cent of the population died. The Black Death also visited Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Only in Scotland does the mortality seem to have been significantly lower, perhaps because the plague was at its most deadly in crowded towns and ports.

Recovery from the Black Death was slow. The population of England may have been reduced to about 2" million. Not until the middle of the 15th cent. did the rate of increase pick up. But during Tudor times, the population reached its pre-plague position and by the end of the 16th cent. stood at just over 4 million. The population of Ireland was about 1 million, that of Scotland perhaps a little less. Wales was still very thinly populated with about 350, 000 people. At over 200, 000 London was already the largest town in western Europe and outstripping all its rivals.

From the 17th cent. the sources for demographic study improve. Thomas Cromwell ordered the keeping of parish registers from 1538, but many incumbents did not at first do so, and some registers have been destroyed by fire, flood, wars, and mice. The high Tudor growth rate was not sustained throughout the whole 17th cent., when emigration, civil war, and plague dampened the increase. The population of England and Wales rose to about 5.4million by 1656 and then steadied, or even declined slightly. Scotland was affected by plague in the 1640s, heavy emigration to Ulster, and by severe famine in the 1690s. Its population in 1700 was probably little higher than in 1600: Edinburgh, by far the largest town, had between 30, 000 and 40, 000 people. Despite heavy warfare, the Irish population may have doubled by 1687 and reached well over 2 million by 1700, with Dublin beginning to grow rapidly. London continued to grow disproportionately, had reached half a million by 1700, and was larger than all the other urban centres together.

There were few indications at the beginning of the 18th cent. that the British Isles were on the threshhold of a population explosion. The causes of the acceleration to come have been extensively debated. The establishment of voluntary hospitals and improved methods of combating smallpox were bound to be slow since they did not operate much outside urban areas. Plague at last disappeared. Agricultural yields were improving and the development of turnpike roads and canals later in the century enabled food to be transported more quickly to areas of shortage. But any explanation must have a European dimension since the increase was a general one. The early view that the population rise was largely due to a falling death rate has been increasingly challenged, partly because the increase accompanied widespread urbanization and 18th-cent. cities were by no means healthy places. More emphasis is now placed upon a significant rise in fertility rates, as a result of people marrying earlier, and because a smaller proportion of the population remained unmarried. The move to towns may have freed young men to marry.

Though the causes of the great acceleration are still far from agreed, the consequences are clear. From the 1740s onwards, the population began to rise, not to fall again as it had so often in the past, but a sustained and incremental growth. From 5.7 million in 1750, the population of England reached 8.6 million by 1800 and 16.5 million by 1850. The Scottish population also grew, particularly in the industrial and trading towns of the central region—from 1.2 million in 1750 to 1.6 million by 1800 and 2.8 million by 1850. But the most startling increase was in Ireland, where from about 3 million in 1750, it reached 5 million by 1800, and in 1845, on the brink of the famine, stood at well over 8million, dangerously dependent on the potato harvest.

The Irish Famine, from 1845 to 1848, was a unique event in modern European demography. One million people died of starvation and disease, the birth rate fell, and there was a large-scale exodus, mainly of younger people, in the decades after the disaster. Well over a million people left Ireland in the 1840s, another million in the 1850s, and 850, 000 in the 1860s—mainly for North America, and especially from Munster and Ulster. The Irish population was down to 6.5 million by 1851, 5.8 million by 1861, 4.4 million by 1901.

In the rest of Britain, the sustained growth was felt in every part of public life. Internationally, it changed Britain's relative position. In 1550 the population of Spain and Portugal was double that of the British Isles: by 1914 the position was reversed. Just before 1914 the population of the United Kingdom passed that of France. Despite Malthus' fears of extra mouths to feed, agricultural improvements meant that fewer farm labourers could support more and more factory workers. The increase provided labour for the industrial expansion and purchasing power to sustain it. The internal balance of England shifted as the great industrial towns of the north developed. In Scotland, Glasgow rose from a town of 10, 000 in 1688 to a conurbation of a million in 1901: in Wales, the balance of population moved to the mining areas of the south and Cardiff, a town of 1, 800 people in 1801, had 128, 000 inhabitants by 1901.

The population of England and Wales continued to rise in the 20th cent. By 1996, England and Wales totalled 50 million, Scotland 5 million, Northern Ireland 1" million, and Eire 3" million. England became by far the most densely populated of the major European powers—four times the density of France, and on a par with Holland and Belgium. From this stemmed many social problems: of law and order, bearing in mind that a second-division football match in the 1990s might well attract a crowd twice the size of the second largest city of Stuart England; of traffic jams, road rage, and general transport policy; of noise pollution and broader environmental questions. The slowing down of the birth rate after the Second World War meant an ageing population, with heavy demands on medical care and for pensions. The general movement out of older towns led to the problem of decaying city centres. Though demography is a rarefied and demanding discipline, its implications are profound.

Most ethical thinking supposes a fixed population, and considers such things as the distribution of resources amongst them. If population is itself made a matter of decision, then further problems arise. Do numbers matter by themselves, with it being a better world if more people live lives of some positive happiness? Or does only the average level of welfare matter? If a mother conceives in a way that she knows is likely to bring about the existence of a handicapped child, when she could have acted differently and avoided the risk, why has she done wrong? Nobody would have been better off had she acted otherwise, for the only child that does exist would not have existed. These and other questions are subtly explored in Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984). See also Malthus.

[Ge]

In sampling methods, the sum of all sampling units selected within a data universe.

In statistics, the aggregate of individuals or items from which a sample is taken.

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A population is a group composed of all members of the same species that live in a specific geographical area at a particular time. An example of a population might include all the gray squirrels that live in a certain urban park. The areas occupied by a population could include the small area (measured in square millimeters) occupied by bacteria in a rotting apple to the vast areas of ocean (square kilometers) that include the territory of migrating sperm whales. Population ecology is the branch of ecology that studies the structure and changes within a population. Studies of specific populations will indicate the dynamics of the population, in terms of active, ongoing growth; declining growth; or stability.

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Demography is crucial to an understanding of economic, social, and political life in the Middle East.

Until the nineteenth century, the Middle East experienced a typical Malthusian demographic system: high fertility outpaced high mortality, but there was occasional extraordinary mortality from warfare, famine, or epidemic disease, particularly bubonic plague. The population grew slowly until one of these demographic crises occurred, dipped sharply, then
began to grow slowly once again. This pattern ended in much of the Middle East during the nineteenth century. Despite minor outbreaks, truly catastrophic epidemics ended with the cholera epidemic of 1865. The increase in central government control facilitated security, trade, and delivery of food to famine regions. Egypt's population began to grow early in the century, as did that of Anatolia and the coastal provinces of Ottoman Syria during the 1870s. Iraq, Arabia, and Iran took little part in either the improvement in civil conditions or population growth.

The period of World War I (and the wars in Anatolia that followed it) was a demographic water-shed in the Middle East, a period of great mortality and forced migration unequalled in the previous millennium. After the war, the Middle East began a new period of population growth, erasing the wartime population losses within a decade. Turkey's population began to expand fairly rapidly, from 14.6 million in 1927 to 18 million in 1940. Egypt's population grew from 13 million inhabitants in 1917 to 16 million in 1937. Other countries grew less quickly, but population increased markedly across the region. Nevertheless, the Middle East can be described as underpopulated before World War II. Large areas of potentially fertile lands were uncultivated. Population density was low, due to high mortality and lack of developed resources. By modern standards, mortality had declined only slowly. In late Ottoman times, mortality had averaged more than 3.5 percent per year. This condition only gradually improved between the two world wars. However, Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey managed to lower mortality through irrigation, public sanitation, and by ending conditions of civil unrest that had diminished the distribution of crops and goods. Medical improvement was a minor factor.

Population of the Middle East, 1800 to 2025, in millions*

Year	Population	Year	Population
* Including the areas of today's Bahrain, Egypt, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Israel,Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, West Bank, and Yemen.
SOURCE: Projections to 2000 and 2025 from United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2000. (medium-fertility variant)
TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.
1800	32.8	1925	54.7
1825	33.4	1950	79.2
1850	33.8	1975	154.3
1875	36.0	2000	308.6
1900	44.1	2025	449.3

After World War II, as in much of the world, the Middle Eastern population began to increase rapidly. Fertility, always high, remained so, while introduction of modern medicine greatly lowered mortality. Modern agricultural techniques and the new crops of the green revolution increased the ability of Middle Eastern economies to feed larger populations. The result was a population boom. From 1950 to 1990 the population of the Middle East increased threefold. By the 1960s the rate of population increase meant that, if the high rates continued, future populations would double every twenty-five years. These rates of increase put great strain on the economies of the region. The results have included rapid and unplanned urbanization

Life expectancy at birth*

	1950	2000		1950	2000
* "1950" is actually for the years 1950 - 1955
** 1950 is average for North and South Yemen
SOURCE: United Nations, World Population Prospects, 1990; World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2002.
TTABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.
Bahrain	51	73	Yemen**	33	57
Egypt	42	68	Oman	36	74
Iran	46	69	Qatar	48	75
Iraq	44	61	Saudi Arabia	40	73
Israel	65	78	Syria	46	70
Jordan	43	72	Turkey	44	70
Kuwait	56	77	U.A.E.	48	76
Lebanon	56	71

and unemployment, as well as overuse of fertilizers and poor agricultural techniques that temporarily yield large crop increases but eventually exhaust the soil.

Fertility

The average fertility of Middle Eastern women changed little for centuries. Women who lived through their childbearing years (many did not) could expect to have six to seven children (the total fertility rate). Since the late 1970s fertility decreased in most countries. By 1999 the average woman in Turkey had 2.4 children, in Egypt 3.3, in Iran 2.7. However, in Syria and Saudi Arabia, the average remained very high, at 4.6 per woman. Women in Yemen and Oman had 6.2 children on average. Contraceptive usage varies greatly: in 1999, more than 60 percent of Turkish women used some form of contraception at some time in their lives; in Jordan, 27 percent. In some other countries the figures were much lower. Despite recent reductions, the Middle East remains one of the highest fertility regions in the world.

The history of high fertility has strained the capacity of the Middle Eastern economies. Nearly one-half of the population in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen is children under age fifteen. Even Middle Eastern countries with lower fertility, such as Turkey, have populations in which one-third are under fifteen. (This compares with 21 percent in the United States and 20 percent in Western Europe.)

If present fertility trends continue, future Middle Eastern populations will divide into two very different patterns. Israel is already nearing a European pattern of low fertility. Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, the Emirates, and Turkey are approaching that standard. Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others still retain high fertility. The demographics of the latter countries will in fifty years look very different from those of the former, with very large numbers of children and a fast-growing population. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia taken together had a slightly smaller population than Turkey. If trends continue, in fifty years they will together have twice as many people as Turkey.

Fertility and mortality, 1980 - 1999

	Total fertility rates (births per woman)		Mortality rates (crude death rate/1000 people)
	1980	1999	1980	1999
SOURCE: World Bank, Development Indicators, 2001.
TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.
Egypt	5.1	3.3	13	7
Iran	6.7	2.7	11	6
Israel	3.2	2.9	7	6
Syria	7.4	3.7	9	5
Saudi Arabia	7.3	5.5	9	4
United Arab Emirates	5.4	3.3	5	3
Yemen	7.9	6.2	19	12

Mortality

In the absence of extraordinary causes, fertility would have always outstripped mortality in the traditional Middle East. The population would have risen at approximately 1 percent per year. In fact, epidemics, wars, and famines meant that mortality equaled fertility. The most common causes of death were gastrointestinal diseases. Infant mortality was particularly high, with more than 40 percent of children dying before their first birthday, more than half before age five. Epidemics of plague and cholera caused temporary high mortality. In Egypt, for example, cholera took more than 100,000 lives in each of the epidemics of 1855 and 1865 and almost 200,000 in 1831. Bubonic plague took 500,000 lives in 1835 alone.

Warfare also caused great mortality in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman wars with Russia were particularly deadly for both military and civilian populations. From the beginning of the Balkan Wars in 1912 to the end of fighting in the Turkish War of Independence in 1922, the region suffered some of the worst wartime mortality in history. The highest death rates were found in eastern Anatolia - the result of war between the Ottomans and Russians and conflict between Muslims and Armenians in western Anatolia after the Greek invasion and in Palestine. In Anatolia, 3.8 million died (22 percent), and in Palestine 50,000 (6 percent). In all those conflicts, starvation and disease took a higher toll than did actual battle. Lebanon also suffered mass starvation during the war.

After World War II, the rapid introduction of modern medicine, public sanitation techniques, and agricultural improvements reduced mortality rates sharply. In 1950 the Middle East had a high crude death rate (deaths divided by total population) of more than 2.3 percent a year, but by 1999 it had fallen to less than 0.6 percent a year. Some countries, such as Egypt (0.7 percent in 1999) and Yemen (1.2 percent in 1999) lagged behind. A major part of the postwar improvement came in infant mortality. In 1950 one in five Middle Eastern children died before age five; in 1999 only one in nineteen died before age five, compared to a world average of one in thirteen.

The Iran - Iraq War of 1980 - 1988 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian and
Iraqi soldiers, with consequent effects on the size and gender structure of both populations. In addition, it is estimated that the Baʿthist regime in Iraq killed some three hundred thousand of its own citizens during campaigns against the Kurds in the north of the country and against the Shiʿa in the south.

The United Nations has lowered its projections of the region's population growth to 2025 as a result of the faster than expected decline in fertility. This has translated into slower population growth rates starting in Egypt and spreading east. The absolute increases in population are still growing in many countries because of past fast growth rates, and it will take ten to twenty years for slower growth rates to translate into smaller absolute increases.

Migration

Refugee migrations have been a major demographic factor during the past two centuries. Only the most prominent population transfers can be mentioned here: During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, great population movements took place as direct results of Russian imperial expansion in the Crimea and Caucasus and of nationalistic movements among the Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Russia expelled or caused the migration of approximately 1.2 million Circassian, Abhazian, and Laz Muslims from the lands of the Eastern Black Sea. Of these, 800,000 survived and most eventually settled in what today is Turkey, as did the 300,000 Crimean Tatars forced to emigrate during the 1850s and 1860s. A sizable group of the Circassians were settled in the Arab world. Russian expansion also fostered a century-long population exchange, with much attendant mortality, between the Turks and Kurds of Russian Transcaucasia and the Armenians of Ottoman Anatolia and Iran. Between the 1820s and 1920s, 500,000 Armenians and 400,000 Muslims (not including the Circassians and Abhazians) crossed the borders. During World War I, an estimated one million Muslims were internal refugees in Eastern Anatolia; an estimated 275,000 Armenians were deported to or were refugees in the Arab world, and 135,000 were refugees in Europe and the Americas.

Nearly 600,000 Turks (40 percent of its Turkish population) were surviving refugees from the new state of Bulgaria after the Russian - Ottoman Wars of 1877 - 1878. Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro expelled to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace 414,000 Turks during and immediately after the Balkan Wars of 1912 - 1913. During World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed, more than one million Greeks from Anatolia and eastern Thrace went to Greece and 360,000 Turks from Greece to Turkey. Up to 1.5 million Turks were internal refugees within Anatolia and eastern Thrace during the Greek-Turkish war.

Before World War II a major immigration of primarily European Jews swelled the Jewish population of Palestine from 60,000 in 1918 to 600,000 in 1946. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were refugees in the Arab-Israel War of 1948. Between 1948 and 1975, 1.6 million Jews came to Israel. Half of these were from the Middle East and North Africa, another third from Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans. Immigration to Israel has continued recently with nearly one million Jews from Russia and successor states.

The only Middle Eastern country to be heavily affected by refugees from the Afghan War was Iran, which accepted more than two million Afghan refugees. Turkey took in 300,000 ethnic Turkish refugees from Bulgaria, as well as Iranian refugees after the Iranian revolution and Kurdish refugees after the Gulf War. Many of the refugees to Iran and Turkey have been repatriated or have moved to other countries. A significant number of the refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Bulgaria have returned home at least once, only to leave once again when economic and political conditions changed.

The quest for employment has been a major cause of migration into and from the Middle East. In Ottoman times, 175,000 Turkish emigrants went to the United States from 1869 to 1914. More recently,
the International Labor Organization estimated that 1.8 million Turks were working in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium in 1988. During the same year, 20,000 Koreans, 50,000 Indonesians, and 90,000 from the Philippines worked in the Gulf states. Before the Gulf War, up to two million foreign workers, mainly Egyptians, worked in Iraq.

Urbanization has been the most significant factor in internal migration in the modern Middle East. Driven by population pressure in rural areas, the urban population increased from twenty-one million (27 percent urban) in 1950 to 185 million (60 percent urban) in 1999. There is considerable variance between countries: In 1990, Syria's population was only half urban, Egypt's less than half urban, while the populations of Iraq and Turkey were more than 60 percent urban. Istanbul was one of the twenty largest cities in the world. Smaller countries such as Israel and Lebanon were as urbanized as Europe or North America.

Censuses and Population Data

A census by definition registers the entire population at one time. Prior to 1882 no real census was taken in the Middle East. In the place of censuses, the Ottoman and Egyptian governments made compilations of registration data. The registers were lists of inhabitants by household in each village, taken by government officials. These often produced surprisingly accurate counts of the population, especially in areas that were under close governmental control. On occasion, the central governments of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire ordered general updates and compilations of the registers. During the 1860s the Ottoman government began to publish population numbers in the salnames (yearbooks) of its provinces. The Ottoman compilations usually listed data by sex and religion only, even though age-specific figures were kept and are available in archives. The 1313 Istatistik-i Umumi ("1895 General Statistics") was the only Ottoman publication to include data by age group. Population data was collected sporadically in Iran, but was not published officially.

The first real census in the Middle East was taken by the khedival government in Egypt just prior to the British occupation in 1882. Under British statistical influence, Egypt published censuses in 1897, 1907, 1917, 1927, and 1937. The British also undertook a limited form of census in Aden (later People's Democratic Republic of Yemen) in 1881, then published other counts of Aden, as part of the censuses of India, in 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921, and 1931. The Turkish republic began a modern census

Middle Eastern censuses after World War II

TABLE BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES, THE GALE GROUP.
Bahrain	1941,	1950,	1959,	1965,	1971,	1981,	1991,	2001
Egypt	1947,	1960,	1966,	1976,	1986
Iran	1956,	1966,	1976,	1986,	1996
Iraq	1947,	1957,	1965,	1977,	1987,	1997
Israel	1948,	1961,	1972,	1983,	1995
Jordan	1952,	1961,	1979,	1994
Kuwait	1957,	1961,	1965,	1970,	1975,	1980,	1985,	1990,
	1995
Lebanon	1970
N. Yemen	1975,	1986
Oman	1977,	1981,	1993,	2000
Qatar	1970,	1986,	1997
Saudi Arabia	1962/63,	1974,	1992
S. Yemen	1946,	1955,	1973,	1988
Syria	1947,	1960,	1970,	1981,	1994
Turkey	1927,	1935,	1940,	1945,	1950,	1955,	1960,	1965,
	1970,	1975,	1980,	1985,	1990,	2000
U.A.E.	1968,	1975,	1980,	1985,	1990,	1995

program with censuses in 1927 and 1935, followed by censuses every five years. The British Mandate government in Palestine took fairly accurate and very detailed censuses in 1922 and 1931, and with limited success updated the census data through birth and death records and published the data in the Palestine Blue Books. The French collected data in Syria and Lebanon, but only published brief summaries that indicate poor recording. An incomplete census was taken in Lebanon in 1942 - 1943.

Modern Middle Eastern censuses have routinely been supplemented by publications of detailed information on marriage, divorce, birth, and death, although these often have been accurate only for urban areas. Sample surveys of the population, often supported by the United Nations or other international bodies, have also been published.

Bibliography

Karpat, Kemal H. Ottoman Population, 1830 - 1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

McCarthy, Justin. The Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans(1878 - 1914): A Handbook of Historical Statistics. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

United Nations. Demographic Yearbook. New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistical Office, 1948 - .

United Nations. World Population Monitoring. New York: United Nations, Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, 1989 - .

United Nations. World Population Prospects. New York: United Nations, 1900s - . 2000 edition available from http://www.un.org/esa/population.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Sex and Age Distributions of Population. New York: United Nations, 1990 - 1996.

— JUSTIN MCCARTHY
UPDATED BY PAUL RIVLIN

sign description: The P-hand moves up the fingers from the pinky to the thumb.

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Quotes:

"If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman-and each nation --must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem." - Lyndon B. Johnson

"The purpose of population is not ultimately peopling earth. It is to fill heaven." - Graham D. Leonard

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio." - Thomas Robert Malthus

"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist." - George Bernard Shaw

"Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die." - Gore Vidal

See more famous quotes about Population

1. (in biology) any group of individual organisms of the same species inhabiting a given area; the number of such individual organisms.
2. (in statistics) or universe any finite or infinite collection of individuals or items from which a sample has been drawn.

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All of the animals in a specifically defined area considered as a whole. The population may also be defined in modes other than geography, e.g. the cow population, a species specification, the nocturnal bird population.

• binomial p. — see binomial population.
• p. cartogram — a map of populations.
• case p. — see case population.
• closed p. — e.g. closed herd or flock; a population into which no introductions are permitted, including artificial insemination or embryo transfer; the population is genetically and/or hygienically isolated.
• comparison p. — see comparison population.
• contiguous p's — the populations are separated but have a common border. Some diseases are very difficult to restrain from spreading from one population to the next.
• control p. — see control population.
• p. density — see population density.
• experimental p. — the population in which the experiment, or trial, is being conducted.
• finite p. — one capable of total examination by census.
• genetic p. — see deme.
• genetically defined p. — one in which the ancestry of the animals in it is known.
• p. genetics — deals with the frequency of occurrence of inherited characteristics in a population.
• infinite p. — cannot be examined as a total population because they may never actually exist but are capable of statistical importance.
• p. limitation — restricting the growth of an animal population by desexing, by culling or by managemental means of interfering with reproduction.
• p. mean — the mean of the population.
• p. numbers — see population size (below).
• open p. — one in which immigration in and out is unrestrained.
• parent p. — the original population about which it is hoped to make some inferences by examination of a sample of its constituent members.
• p. proportion — the percentage of the population that has the subject characteristics.
• p. pyramid — a graphic presentation of the composition of a population with the largest group forming the baseline, the smallest at the apex.
• p. at risk — see risk population (below).
• risk p. — the population which is composed of animals that are exposed to the pathogenic agent under discussion and are inherently susceptible to it. Called also population at risk. High or special risk groups are those which have had more than average exposure to the pathogenic agent.
• p. size — actual counting of a total population, the census method, is not often possible in large animal populations. Alternatives are by various sampling techniques including area trapping, the trapping of all animals in an area, the capture–release–recapture method, the nearest neighbor and line transect methods,
— The population size is expressed as the population present at a particular instant. Alternatively it can be expressed as an animal-duration expression when the population is a shifting one and it is desired to express the population size over a period (e.g. cow-day).
• stable p. — a population which has constant mortality and fertility rates, and no migration, therefore a fixed age distribution and constant growth rate.
• target p. — in epidemiological terms the population from which an experimenter wishes to draw an unbiased sample and make inferences about it.

n

All instances about which a statement is made; all events, organisms, and items of a stated kind occurring or in existence in a specified time. In statistics, a hypothetic infinite supply or universe of events or objects like those being studied and from which a sample was drawn.

For a list of words related to population, see:

• Genetics, Heredity, and Evolution - population: interbreeding group of organisms
• Environment, Ecology, and Animal Behavior - population: group of organisms that naturally interbreeds, living in same locality
• Populations and Resources - population: total number of people in country or region; specific part of people in given region
• Quantities, Relationships, and Operations - population: entire group with which a given statistical study is concerned
• Tools and Techniques - population: all people, things, ideas, or traits that possess those characteristics being measured or studied
• Prison and Punishment - population: prisoners who are not in segregation and are allowed to mix with others

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  See crossword solutions for the clue Population.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - befolkning, folketal

idioms:

• population explosion    befolkningseksplosion

Nederlands (Dutch)
bevolking, populatie, groep, steekproef, opvulling, het bevolken

Français (French)
n. - population

idioms:

• population explosion    explosion démographique

Deutsch (German)
n. - Bevölkerung

idioms:

• population explosion    Bevölkerungsexplosion

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πληθυσμός

idioms:

• population explosion    πληθυσμιακή έκρηξη

Italiano (Italian)
popolazione

idioms:

• population explosion    esplosione demografica

Português (Portuguese)
n. - população (f)

idioms:

• population explosion    explosão populacional

Русский (Russian)
население

idioms:

• population explosion    демографический взрыв

Español (Spanish)
n. - población, habitantes

idioms:

• population explosion    explosión demográfica

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - befolkning, folkmängd, bestånd

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
人口, 人口数

idioms:

• population explosion    人口爆炸, 人口激增

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 人口, 人口數

idioms:

• population explosion    人口爆炸, 人口激增

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 인구, 주민, 식민

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 人口, 全住民, 特定住民, 個体総数

idioms:

• population explosion    急激な人口増加

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) كثافه سكانيه, التزويد السكاني‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אוכלוסין, אוכלוסיה‬

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