In my classroom, I have a "Parking Lot," (poster board taped to the end of the chalkboard,) in which students can post questions that are unrelated to the lesson at hand. This isn't that unusual in a classroom, and it might be my favorite thing in mine. One student posted this question yesterday: "How many people are there in the whole world?"
As I promise to answer each question within 24 hours, I began to do my research this afternoon. It was the first time I have ever been to the U.S. Census Bureau website. If you go to www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html, you can see the current estimate of the both the U.S. population and the world population. When I started this blog, I posted both the estimates as the title. The crazy thing about this website is that if you hit the refresh button after doing some minor task (such as e-mailing your old friend Sam,) you can see how much the population has grown!
After a little more research (I am such a nerd) I found that in the United States there is one birth every 7 seconds, one death every 13 seconds, and one international migrant every 26. This adds up to a net gain of one person every 10 seconds. I cannot wrap my mind around this math at all, but I'm fascinated by it. I couldn't find such math for the world population, but every month there is a growth in world population by 6,000,000 people. Six million!! Every month!!
Okay, so this might be my most boring blog, and I promise to return to the regular ramblings. There are just some things I learn from preparing to teach that stun me. So, at the close of this little numbers narrative, here is the new population: U.S. : 297,120,528 ; World : 6,465,515,854.
Can you believe that? That many more people in about two minutes!
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