If the UK was a village of 100 people

There are, according to the estimate for this month, 6,790,062,216 people in the world. It's hard enough to say the number, never mind picture those people.

To keep these figures under control, researchers often try to imagine the world as one hundred people. Last week the Daily Mail tried to do the same thing for the UK asking the question

‘If England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were condensed to a single community of 100 people, what would that community look like?’

The results a fascinating and will liven up the start of any population unit. You can read the full article here over on the Daily Mail website. I’ve picked out my favourite facts below:

• IF BRITAIN was a village of 100 people, then 17 of the villagers would be under the age of 15, while another 16 would be 65 or over (three of them 80 or over).
• THERE would be 80 adults (aged 16 or over), of whom 40 would be married and 11 would be alone.
• THERE would be 42 households in the village, of which 13 would be home to just one person.
• EIGHTY-FOUR people would live in England, eight in Scotland, five in Wales and three in Northern Ireland.
• EIGHT people would live in Greater London (one of them in Croydon).
• THERE would be 51 women and girls, and 49 men and boys.
• THE villagers would have 118 mobile phones among them (66 of which would be pay-as-you-go). There would be 55 telephone landlines.
• THERE would be 90 TVs (an average of two-plus per household).
• TWENTY-ONE villagers would have watched Andy Murray beat Stanislas Wawrinka at Wimbledon this year; 32 people would have watched Susan Boyle lose Britain's Got Talent.
• OF THE 42 households in the village, 32 would have satellite, digital or cable television.
• TWENTY-SEVEN households would have access to the internet (24 of those would have a broadband connection).
• THIRTY people would have a Facebook account.
• SIXTEEN of the villagers would be at school  -  of whom one would be in private education.
• ONE person in the village would be illiterate.
• THERE would be one teacher.
• THE richest ten people in the village would receive 30 per cent of the total income. Between them, they would earn more than the poorest 50 combined.
• THE poorest ten people in the village would receive 2 per cent of the total income.
• TWENTY people would claim the state pension; 12 would be women.
• THERE would be a total of 74 voters, but only 26 of them would have gone to the polls at this year's European elections.
• BETWEEN them, the villagers would spend £2,955 a week on food and non-alcoholic drinks. They would spend £1,154 a week on food eaten outside the home, of which £355 would go towards alcohol.
• SEVENTY-EIGHT of the villagers would have a passport.
• FIFTY-FIVE would have a driving licence.

Thanks to Great Geography for the heads up on this.

Comments

[Almost American]

Thanks for sharing that.

More passports than driver's licenses eh? I wouldn't have guessed that. Quite definitely the opposite here in the US!!

More than one mobile per person? Wow!

And I had no idea the English outnumbered the other nationalities by so much!

Definitely a good teaching tool!

[Jim McDougall]

Lots of potential teaching points here!

[Ewan McIntosh]

I just find it so hard to visualise the growth RATE that this represents, since it doesn't seem that long ago that we were celebrating the 6 billionth member of the population (when was that?), yet it feels ages ago since I was learning at school that the population of the world was 5 billion.

This is exponentialism in action, something which when it comes to microchips I can experience and understand thanks to using and seeing first hand what that growth rate means, but which in terms of babies just makes my mind boggle.